What Does Exodus 32:16 Mean?
And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, cut into the tablets.
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 the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.THE KEY
God is named as the maker of both the surface and the inscription it carries.
THE MEANING
The verse holds the tablet and its writing under one source: the tables are God’s work, and the writing is God’s. The words and what receives them belong together in a single act of authorship.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the split that treats the message as sacred while the thing that carries it is spiritually incidental.
THE ROOT
מִכְתָּב
mikhtav
GROWS FROM
כתב
k-t-b
To write or inscribe.
The verse uses מִכְתָּב (mikhtav, “writing”) twice, naming the inscription and then naming it as God’s. The root also reaches from the act of writing to script and written documents, holding together the act and the form it leaves behind.
ALSO GROWS
katav: To write.
כָּתַב
This is the act behind the inscription the verse calls God’s writing.
ketav: Writing or script.
כְּתָב
It names the visible form left by the act of writing, the form the tablets bear.
ketubah: A written marriage contract.
כְּתֻבָּה
The same root can mark a bond in a durable written form, showing how writing holds something in place.
THE PATTERN
Divine writing marks its source and its receiving surface, moving from stone toward the inward heart.
And the LORD said to Moses, Come up to me into the mountain, and be there, and I will give you tablets of stone, and instruction, and commandments which I have written, that you may teach them.But this is the covenant I will cut with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will set my instruction within them, and write it upon their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.You are made visible as the letter of the Anointed One, served by us, written not with ink but with the breath of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh in the heart.THE THREAD
But this is the covenant I will cut with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will set my instruction within them, and write it upon their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.The Hebrew root כָּתַב (katav, “write”) appears here in “I will write,” joining the writing on the tablets to the writing described in this verse. The inscription opens from stone into the inward parts and heart.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us