What Does Exodus 23:10 Mean?
Six years you shall sow your land, and you shall gather in what comes in from it.
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
And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof:THE KEY
The root of “sow” also names seed and offspring, so the harvest begins as life already carried in the planting.
THE MEANING
Your labor has a season for planting and gathering what the land brings forth. The verse holds those acts together: what enters the ground is followed, in time, by a yield brought in. Even productive work is counted within a measured span.
THE ROOT
תִּזְרַע
tizraʿ
GROWS FROM
זרע
z-r-ʿ
to sow; the root also names seed and offspring
“sow” in this verse is tizraʿ. The verb for sowing shares its root with the word for seed, which also means offspring. Planting and the life that grows from it belong to one word-family: the future yield is already carried in what goes into the ground.
ALSO GROWS
zeraʿ: seed; offspring
זֶרַע
The same root names both what is planted and the next generation, linking sowing with the life it can bring forth.
zōrēaʿ: one who sows; a sower
זֹרֵעַ
This form names the person through the act of placing seed, keeping the sower and the seed-to-harvest process within one root-family.
תְּבוּאָתָהּ
tĕvûʾātāh
GROWS FROM
בוא
b-w-ʾ
to come or enter; produce is what comes in
The word for produce belongs to the root of “come” and “enter”: the yield is pictured as what comes in. The verse’s harvest is not only growth in the field, but that growth arriving as provision.
ALSO GROWS
bōʾ: to come; to enter
בּוֹא
This verbal form supplies the root sense behind produce as what comes in.
māvōʾ: entrance; entry
מָבוֹא
This related noun shows the root’s movement into a place, echoing the produce’s arrival from field to gathering.
וְאָסַפְתָּ
veʾāsaphtā
GROWS FROM
אסף
ʾ-s-p
to gather, collect, or assemble
The verb “gather” shares its root with אָסִיף (ʾāsîf), “ingathering,” named later in this chapter as the harvest festival. It also belongs to the family of words for assembling: the yield is brought together as the season’s gathered result.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāsîf: ingathering; harvest
אָסִיף
Exodus 23:16 uses this related word for the feast of ingathering, connecting the verb here with the season’s collected yield.
ʾasuppāh: gathering; assembly
אֲסֻפָּה
This branch extends the root from collecting produce to bringing things or people together.
THE PATTERN
What is sown unfolds through time into a yield that is gathered in its season.
All the days of the earth, sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not stop.But this I say, the one who sows in holding back reaps in holding back, and the one who sows in blessings reaps in blessings.THE THREAD
Those who sow in tears reap in a ringing cry.Psalm 126 uses the same Hebrew root for “sow,” carrying the field’s planting into a human season of tears and joy. It opens this verse’s agricultural rhythm as a connection between present labor and a later yield.
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