What Does Ezekiel 16:3 Mean?
Thus says the Lord LORD to Jerusalem, your bearing and your birth are of the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite.
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 say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.THE KEY
The root behind nativity also names generations, making Jerusalem’s origin a lineage that keeps taking form.
THE MEANING
This verse meets the reader wherever a revered identity is treated as proof of a pure origin. Jerusalem’s birth and parentage are named in Canaanite terms, and the accusation stays sharp: sacred status does not conceal the lineage being exposed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A sacred identity or inherited status guarantees a pure origin.
THE ROOT
מֹלְדֹתַיִךְ
moledotayikh
GROWS FROM
ילד
y-l-d
To bear or beget; to bring forth.
“bearing and birth” in this verse is moledotayikh. The word rendered nativity comes from the root ילד (y-l-d), to bear or beget, the same seed that names a child and the generations that follow. The accusation frames origin as what is brought forth and carried onward, not merely a place on a map.
ALSO GROWS
yalad: To bear, beget.
יָלַד
The verb behind nativity makes the word a result of bringing forth.
yeled: Child.
יֶלֶד
The same seed names the one brought forth, tying origin to offspring.
toledot: Generations, genealogies.
תּוֹלְדוֹת
This branch carries birth forward into the lineage a person or people produces.
THE PATTERN
Ancestry in scripture names the nature a people reproduce, not merely the pedigree they claim.
You are your mother's daughter, who recoils from her husband and her children; and you are the sister of your sisters, who recoiled from their husbands and their children; your mother was a Hittite, and your father an Amorite.And do not think to say within yourselves, We have Abraham for our father; for I say to you, God is able to raise up children for Abraham out of these stones.They answered and said to him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, If you were Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham.THE THREAD
This is the book of the births of Adam. In the day that God created the ground-being, in the likeness of God he made him.Genesis calls its lineage תּוֹלְדוֹת (toledot), generations, from the same ילד (y-l-d), to bear or beget, root as Ezekiel’s nativity. The shared root links origin to what continues to be brought forth.
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