What Does Ezekiel 16:56 Mean?
For your sister Sodom was not a report in your mouth on the day of your swelling.
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
For thy sister Sodom was not mentioned by thy mouth in the day of thy pride,THE KEY
Pride can hide a mirror by keeping its name out of your mouth.
THE MEANING
Your pride can keep another’s ruin out of your mouth when naming it would unsettle your sense of distance from it. Sodom is the unspoken mirror: the silence around her name reveals what self-exaltation cannot comfortably admit.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
If I never name the comparison, it cannot reveal my likeness to what I condemn.
THE ROOT
לִשְׁמוּעָה
li-shemuʿah
GROWS FROM
שמע
shamaʿ
To hear, listen, or heed.
לִשְׁמוּעָה (li-shemuʿah) means a report, something heard, so the word translated “mentioned” carries hearing inside speech. Pride leaves Sodom outside the mouth, and the suppressed report becomes a measure of what the speaker cannot acknowledge.
ALSO GROWS
shamaʿ: To hear or listen.
שָׁמַע
A report begins as something heard; here the verse places that report in what the mouth says.
shemiʿah: Hearing or listening.
שְׁמִיעָה
This branch keeps hearing joined to the report that pride leaves unspoken.
THE PATTERN
Pride preserves a false distance from truths another’s condition would reveal about the self, through silence, comparison, or imagined immunity.
Swelling goes before breaking, and a breath lifted high goes before a stumbling.The seething of your heart has deceived you, you who dwell in the hollows of the rock, whose seat is in the heights, who says in his heart, Who will bring me down to the earth?The separated one stood and prayed this way within himself, God, I thank you, that I am not like the rest of humankind, the grasping, the misaligned, the adulterers, or even like this tax collector.THE THREAD
Who has leaned their weight on what we have heard, and upon whom has the arm of the LORD been uncovered?Isaiah calls the message “our report,” using the same Hebrew root שמע (shamaʿ), hearing, that appears in Ezekiel’s word for what is mentioned. The shared root joins what is heard to what is spoken, making the silence around Sodom’s name part of the verse’s disclosure.
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