What Does Ezekiel 13:7 Mean?
Have you not seen an empty vision, and have you not spoken a lying divination, while you say, The LORD says it, though I have not spoken?
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
Have ye not seen a vain vision, and have ye not spoken a lying divination, whereas ye say, The LORD saith it; albeit I have not spoken?THE KEY
The false prophets do not merely misread a vision: they lend God’s name to speech God disowns.
THE MEANING
This verse meets you where a message claims the LORD’s authority: the claim and the source are not the same. A vision can be empty and a divination false even while its speaker says, “The LORD saith it”; God’s name does not make those words God’s own.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the belief that saying “The LORD said it” makes a message God’s word.
THE ROOT
דִּבַּרְתִּי
dibbarti
GROWS FROM
דבר
d-b-r
To speak or communicate.
The Hebrew sets the prophets’ “you say” (אָמַר, amar) beside God’s “I have not spoken” (דִּבַּרְתִּי, dibbarti), using different roots. They are not opposites, but the distinction keeps a human claim separate from its claimed source: God’s name cannot authenticate words God has not spoken.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: Spoke or communicated.
דִּבֵּר
This is the verb form behind God’s denial that the message came from divine speech.
davar: Word, matter, or thing.
דָּבָר
The same root links speaking with the word or matter being spoken; the verse challenges who stands behind that message.
כָּזָב
kazav
GROWS FROM
כזב
k-z-b
To lie or be false; in some contexts, to fail.
“lying” in this verse is kazav. The Hebrew phrase is a “divination of falsehood,” placing falsity inside the claimed revelation itself. The same root can describe what proves false, so the problem is not merely a mistaken detail: the message claims a divine source that it does not have.
ALSO GROWS
kazav: Falsehood or a lie.
כָּזָב
This is the word describing the divination: its falsity belongs to the message, even as it claims the LORD’s authority.
kazab: To lie or be false; sometimes to fail.
כָּזַב
The verb form carries falsity as a condition of the claim, not just as an error in its details.
THE PATTERN
A message that borrows God’s authority without coming from God remains exposed as a human claim.
When the prophet speaks in the nature of the LORD, if the word does not come to be, nor arrive, it is the word the LORD has not spoken, but the prophet has spoken it in a boiling over. You shall not cower from him.Thus says the LORD of hosts, Do not hear and respond to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you; they make you vapor. They speak a sight of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD.Beloved, do not lean your weight on every breath, but test the breaths, whether they come out of God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.THE THREAD
When the prophet speaks in the nature of the LORD, if the word does not come to be, nor arrive, it is the word the LORD has not spoken, but the prophet has spoken it in a boiling over. You shall not cower from him.The same Hebrew root דבר (d-b-r), meaning to speak, appears in both verses’ contrast between what God has spoken and what a prophet claims. Deuteronomy makes that distinction visible: the claim can carry the LORD’s name while its words belong to the claimant.
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