What Does Ezekiel 14:17 Mean?
Or if I bring a sword upon that land, and say, Sword, cross through the land, and I cut off man and beast from it.
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
Or if I bring a sword upon that land, and say, Sword, go through the land; so that I cut off man and beast from it:THE KEY
The Hebrew verb for “cut off” shares its root with “cut a covenant,” placing severance and covenant-making in the same word-family.
THE MEANING
The verse holds a stark conditional: if the sword passes through this land, both human and animal life are cut off from it. The sword is commanded to cross the land, making the land itself the path of devastation.
THE ROOT
וְהִכְרַתִּי
ve-hikhratti
GROWS FROM
כרת
to cut or sever
“and I cut off” in this verse is ve-hikhratti. וְהִכְרַתִּי (ve-hikhratti) means “I will cut off,” from כרת (karat), “to cut, sever.” This same root appears in כָּרַת בְּרִית (karat berit), “cut a covenant,” so Hebrew uses cutting both for severance and for covenant-making.
ALSO GROWS
karat berit: to cut a covenant; an idiom for making a covenant
כָּרַת בְּרִית
The same root that describes life being cut off also appears in the language of establishing a covenant.
keritut: severance; divorce
כְּרִיתֻת
This branch names a relationship being severed, echoing the verse’s language of cutting life off from the land.
THE PATTERN
When judgment moves through a land, its reach can extend across the living world rather than stopping at individual people.
The ravagers have come upon all the high places through the wilderness. For the sword of the LORD shall eat from one end of the land even to the other end of the land. No flesh shall have wholeness.Therefore the land shall mourn, and every one who settles in it shall wither, along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens. Even the fish of the sea shall be swept away.And I see, and look, a grass-green horse, and the name of the one seated upon it is Death, and Hades follows with him. And power is given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
On that day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram, saying, To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.Genesis 15:18 says “made a covenant,” while its Hebrew idiom is כָּרַת בְּרִית (karat berit), literally “cut a covenant.” The same root, כרת (karat), appears here as “cut off,” placing covenant-making and severance in the same word-family.
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