What Does Exodus 23:29 Mean?
I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land be emptied, and the beasts of the field multiply against you.
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
I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee.THE KEY
The danger is not only what remains in the land, but the vacancy left when people are driven out too quickly.
THE MEANING
The promise is a paced but explicit expulsion: the people before you are driven out, not in one year, because sudden vacancy would leave the land desolate and the wild animals would multiply against you. The verse presents that timing as protection for your habitation; it does not name protection for those expelled.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that immediate, complete removal automatically makes a place safe: the verse names vacancy itself as a danger.
THE ROOT
אֲגָרְשֶׁנּוּ
agarshennu
GROWS FROM
גרש
to drive out, expel, or cast away
“drive them out” in this verse is agarshennu. This root names forceful expulsion; Hebrew uses a form from the same root for a woman put away from her husband. English “drive out” can sound like clearing an obstacle, while the root keeps the human act of casting people out in view, even as the verse limits its pace.
ALSO GROWS
agarshennu: I will drive him or them out
אֲגָרְשֶׁנּוּ
This is the verse’s own form of the root, naming the promised expulsion directly.
gerushah: A woman put away from her husband
גְּרוּשָׁה
The same root can name a forced separation from a household, showing the weight carried by “drive out.”
שְׁמָמָה
shemamah
GROWS FROM
שמם
to be desolate, devastated, or laid waste
“be emptied” in this verse is shemamah. The land does not become simply empty; it becomes waste. The verse places that ruined condition beside the multiplying wild animals, so vacancy itself is part of the danger.
ALSO GROWS
shamem: To become desolate or be laid waste
שָׁמֵם
The verb shows desolation as a condition the land enters, not merely a space without people.
shemamah: Desolation or waste
שְׁמָמָה
This noun names the threatened state of the land if the expulsion happens all at once.
THE PATTERN
When a place is cleared faster than it can be inhabited, the vacancy can become a condition for danger to multiply.
By small measures I will drive them out from before you, until you are fruitful and take hold of the land.The LORD your God will drive out those nations before you little by little. You cannot finish them at once, lest the beasts of the field multiply against you.Then it goes and takes along with itself seven other breaths more evil than itself, and they enter and settle there, and the last state of that human becomes worse than the first. So it will also be for this evil generation.THE THREAD
So he drove out the man, and he pitched the cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and the flaming sword that turned every way would guard the way of the tree of life.“Drove out” translates the same root, גרש (garash), that names the expulsion in Exodus. In Genesis the human is driven out of the garden; here people are driven from the land in stages, and the timing determines whether the opened space remains habitable.
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