What Does Exodus 32:35 Mean?
And the LORD struck the people, because they made the calf which Aaron made.
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 LORD plagued the people, because they made the calf, which Aaron made.THE KEY
The Hebrew behind “plagued” carries the concrete sense of a blow, and the verse names the LORD who strikes, the people who make the calf, and Aaron who makes it.
THE MEANING
This verse holds making and consequence together: the people are struck because they make the calf, and Aaron’s part remains named. Shared responsibility does not blur individual agency.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that shared wrongdoing makes a leader’s part disappear; the verse names the people’s making and Aaron’s making in the same sentence.
THE ROOT
וַיִּגֹּף
wayyiggōp
GROWS FROM
נגף
n-g-p
To strike, smite, or dash against.
“struck” in this verse is wayyiggōp. Alongside the KJV’s “plagued,” the Hebrew verb carries the concrete sense of striking. A related noun can mean plague or defeat, holding the large calamity together with the image of a blow.
ALSO GROWS
nāgaph: To strike or dash against.
נָגַף
In Psalm 91:12, the same verb describes a foot dashing against a stone, showing the root’s concrete force.
maggēphāh: Plague, outbreak, or defeat.
מַגֵּפָה
This related noun names a calamity as a blow from the same root.
THE PATTERN
What people make and set in motion does not remain outside them; it can reshape them or return upon them.
Those who make them are like them, everyone who leans on them.Whoever digs a pit falls into it; whoever rolls a stone, it turns back upon him.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
They lift you up on their palms, lest your foot dash against a stone.Psalm 91:12 uses this same root for the foot that might “dash” against a stone. The shared root reveals the concrete image of striking inside Exodus’s “plagued,” though the scale shifts from one body to a people.
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