What Does Ezekiel 23:49 Mean?
And they will give your lewdness upon you, and you will bear the shortcomings of your idols. And you will perceive that I am the Lord GOD.
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 they shall recompense your lewdness upon you, and ye shall bear the sins of your idols: and ye shall know that I am the Lord GOD.THE KEY
The verse pictures judgment as a transfer: what is devised is set upon its makers, then carried.
THE MEANING
What is devised through idols is set upon you, and you carry the sins bound to those idols. You recognize the LORD within this judgment; the knowledge named here comes through the consequence itself.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that devotion to an idol keeps its wrongdoing outside the worshiper is undone: the worshiper bears the idols’ sins.
THE ROOT
וְנָתְנוּ
venatnu
GROWS FROM
נתן
give, set, place
The verb rendered “recompense” is natan: give, set, place. Together with “upon you,” it pictures the wrongdoing being placed on the people who then bear it.
ALSO GROWS
mattanah: gift, something given
מַתָּנָה
This noun from the same root keeps the concrete sense of giving beneath the verse’s judgment language.
netinim: the given ones
נְתִינִים
The name for temple servants carries the same root of giving or assigning, echoing the act of placing something upon someone.
תִּשָּׂאֶינָה
tissaʾenah
GROWS FROM
נשא
lift, carry, bear
“bear” in this verse is tissaʾenah. The verse makes the sins a load that you carry. The same root can describe bearing crookedness or lifting it away, so the burden is concrete, and elsewhere in Scripture it can be released.
ALSO GROWS
massaʾ: load, burden
מַשָּׂא
This noun from the same root makes the carrying in the verse tangible: the wrongdoing is a burden borne.
nasaʾ avon: bear or lift crookedness; idiomatically, release guilt
נָשָׂא עָוֹן
Exodus 34:7 uses the same verb with crookedness, showing how one root can name bearing a burden and lifting it away.
זִמָּתֵכֶן
zimmatekhen
GROWS FROM
זמם
devise, plan, plot
The word behind “lewdness” belongs to a family of words for devising and scheming. It carries the shade of deliberate wrongdoing, which the verse then shows being set upon its makers.
ALSO GROWS
zamam: devise, plot
זָמַם
This verb shows the intentional dimension inside the word translated “lewdness.”
mezimmah: plan, scheme; often an evil design
מְזִמָּה
This related noun makes the connection between a devised course and the wrongdoing borne in the verse.
THE PATTERN
What is set in motion becomes a burden its makers carry.
For they sow breath, and they will reap the whirlwind. It has no stalk. The sprout will yield no meal. If it yields, strangers will swallow it up.Therefore they eat from the fruit of their way, and they are filled with their own counsel.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the plunder with the strong, because he poured out his living soul to death, and was counted with the rebels. He carried the falling short of many, and for the rebels he stepped in.Isaiah uses the same root, נשא (nasa, lift or carry), when it says the servant “bare the sin of many.” The shared word places two bearers beside one another: here the people carry the sins of their idols; there, the servant bears the sin of many.
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