What Does Exodus 20:23 Mean?
You shall not make gods of silver beside me, and you shall not make for yourselves gods of gold.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.THE KEY
The verse forbids making a visible power to stand beside God or a sacred object to serve our own purposes.
THE MEANING
The verse names a live temptation: to make divinity visible, costly, and available to our own purposes, or to place a human-made power beside God. Its paired phrases, “with me” and “unto you”, hold both directions at once: God cannot be supplemented, and sacred power cannot be fashioned as personal possession.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a costly, visible object can make divine power more present or more available to own.
THE ROOT
תַעֲשׂוּן
taʿasun
GROWS FROM
עשה
To do, make, or carry out.
The same root names the human making here and “the LORD made” in verse 11. One verb holds both acts in view while the passage distinguishes them: what people make cannot become the maker of heaven and earth.
ALSO GROWS
maʿaseh: Work, deed
מַעֲשֵׂה
Psalm 115:4 calls idols “the work of men’s hands,” showing the human act behind the made object.
ʿoseihem: Their makers
עֹשֵׂיהֶם
Psalm 115:8 says their makers become like them, revealing that what people make can shape the makers in return.
THE PATTERN
What human hands fashion into a sacred form cannot become the life-giving source it represents.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.Who has shaped a god, or poured out a hewn image that profits nothing?Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by craft and by human imagining.THE THREAD
For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and settled on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and set it apart.“Made” in both verses comes from the Hebrew root עשה (ʿasah), meaning to do or make. The shared verb places the LORD’s making of creation beside human making of gods, opening the distinction between the source of life and what human hands fashion.
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