What Does Exodus 27:2 Mean?
You shall make its horns upon its four corners, rising out of it, and you shall sheathe it with bronze.
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 thou shalt make the horns of it upon the four corners thereof: his horns shall be of the same: and thou shalt overlay it with brass.THE KEY
The altar’s horns rise from the altar itself: its strength is part of its own substance.
THE MEANING
The verse gives the altar four projecting horns and says they come from the altar itself. Its strength belongs to its own structure, and bronze covers the whole.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The altar’s strength must be attached from outside.
THE ROOT
קַרְנֹתָיו
qarnotav
GROWS FROM
ק־ר־ן
q-r-n
To project or rise like a horn; the image extends to rays sent outward.
The root behind “horns” also appears in the word for shining rays. That shared image lets the altar’s horns suggest strength projecting outward from a source, and this verse says that source is the altar itself.
ALSO GROWS
qāran: To send out rays; to shine.
קָרַן
In Exodus 34:29, Moses’ face shines; the same root-image links the altar’s horns with light radiating from a source.
qeren: Horn; also an image of projecting strength, as in “the horn of my salvation” (Psalm 18:2).
קֶרֶן
This sense makes the altar’s horns more than decorative corners: they embody strength rising from the altar.
THE PATTERN
The altar’s horns serve as points of contact: blood is applied there, refuge is seized there, and a voice rises from them.
You take some of the blood of the young bull, and set it upon the horns of the altar with your finger, and pour out all the blood at the foundation of the altar.And Adonijah feared from the face of Solomon, and arose, and walked, and gripped the horns of the altar.And the sixth messenger sounds, and I hear a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God.THE THREAD
And it came to be, when Moses went down from mount Sinai with the two tablets of testimony in Moses' hand, when he went down from the mountain, that Moses did not perceive that the skin of his face sent out horns while he spoke with him.The Hebrew word translated “shone” comes from the same root-family as “horn.” The shared image opens the altar’s horns as something that projects outward from its source, like rays from Moses’ face.
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