What Does Exodus 26:17 Mean?
Two tenons shall be in one board, set in order one against another; thus you shall make for all the boards of the dwelling.
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
Two tenons shall there be in one board, set in order one against another: thus shalt thou make for all the boards of the tabernacle.THE KEY
Each board carries two projecting “hands,” and the dwelling holds together as those hands interlock with the next board.
THE MEANING
The verse shows the tabernacle as a structure made whole through fitted connections between its boards. No board stands as an isolated piece; each one meets its counterpart in a shared framework.
THE ROOT
מְשֻׁלָּבֹת
meshullavot
GROWS FROM
שָׁלַב
to join, fit together, or interlock
“set in order one against another” in this verse is meshullavot. The Hebrew word rendered “set in order” carries the sense of joining or interlocking. The verse’s structure depends on fitted contact: each board’s paired projections meet the next, so the whole is held together through connection.
ALSO GROWS
shalav: to join or interlock
שָׁלַב
The verb names the joining action that the verse’s boards embody.
meshullav: joined or interlocked
מְשֻׁלָּב
This related form describes the fitted state of the boards, where separate pieces become part of one framework.
THE PATTERN
A dwelling becomes one structure when distinct parts are fitted together through their points of connection.
Jerusalem is built as a city bound together.In whom the whole building, joined at the joints, grows into a set-apart temple in the Lord.For as the body is one, and has many limbs, and all the limbs of the body, though many, are one body, so also is the Anointed One.THE THREAD
In whom the whole building, joined at the joints, grows into a set-apart temple in the Lord.Exodus shows the tabernacle’s boards joined through fitted projections; Ephesians carries the same building image into a structure framed together as a temple. In both, the dwelling takes shape through the way its separate parts meet.
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