What Does Ezekiel 16:47 Mean?
Yet you have not walked in their ways, nor done as their recoiling things; but, as if that were a very little thing, you were ruined more than they in all your ways.
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
Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done after their abominations: but, as if that were a very little thing, thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways.THE KEY
The verse exposes the trap of claiming not to follow a corrupt path while letting its corruption spread through every path of your own.
THE MEANING
You can recognize another’s way as corrupt and still carry its pattern further; the damage is no longer imitation alone but the course running through all your ways. The verse brings that contradiction into view now: distance from a model does not prove freedom from what it embodies.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The false belief undone is that avoiding another’s visible wrongdoing proves your own freedom from it; the verse says you can surpass the pattern while claiming not to follow it.
THE ROOT
שָׁחַת
shachath
GROWS FROM
שחת
shachath
To ruin, destroy, or bring to corruption.
“ruined” in this verse is shachath. English “corrupted” can sound like a general moral label; שחת (shachath, to ruin or destroy) carries the force of something brought to ruin. The damage does not stop at copying those ways: it overtakes them and runs through every way of the reader’s life.
ALSO GROWS
mashchit: Destroyer; one who brings destruction.
מַשְׁחִית
This branch makes the root’s destructive force active, illuminating how the verse describes corruption that goes beyond resemblance.
shachat: Pit; destruction.
שַׁחַת
The word’s association with ruin shows the depth of the damage named here: a path can become a way into destruction.
דֶּרֶךְ
derekh
GROWS FROM
דרך
darakh
To tread or take a course.
The Hebrew uses דֶּרֶךְ (derekh, way or course) both for “their ways” and for “all your ways.” Its root דרך (darakh, to tread) makes a way a course worn by movement, so the verse moves from rejecting another’s course to exposing the pattern running through the reader’s own.
ALSO GROWS
darakh: To tread, step, or march.
דָּרַךְ
A way is a course made by repeated steps; the verse’s repeated “ways” points to corruption carried through ongoing movement.
hidrik: To guide or lead.
הִדְרִיךְ
This derived form describes leading someone along a course, echoing how a pattern can shape the direction of a whole life.
THE PATTERN
A pattern someone thinks they have refused can still spread into a fuller corruption that reaches every way of life.
And God looked upon the earth, and look, it was ruined, for all flesh had ruined its way upon the earth.Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers.Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?THE THREAD
And God looked upon the earth, and look, it was ruined, for all flesh had ruined its way upon the earth.The same root שחת (shachath, to ruin or corrupt) appears in both verses. Genesis also ties that corruption to דֶּרֶךְ (derekh, way or course), making visible how the ruin takes shape through the way a life moves.
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