What Does Ezekiel 26:9 Mean?
He will set siege engines against your walls, and with his axes he will tear down your towers.
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 he shall set engines of war against thy walls, and with his axes he shall break down thy towers.THE KEY
The verb translated “break down” also names breaking through a boundary, so the scene becomes a breach worked into the city’s defenses.
THE MEANING
You see how a breach is made: engines press against the wall while axes take the towers down, carrying the attack from the city’s boundary to its height. The verse holds the violence plainly: these defenses are being broken open.
THE ROOT
יַהֲרֹס
yaharos
GROWS FROM
הרס
haras
To tear down, break through, or demolish.
“break” in this verse is yaharos. This root can describe breaking through a boundary as well as demolishing what stands above it. The attack works as a breach in the city’s defenses: pressure at the wall, then the tower brought down.
ALSO GROWS
yehersu: They break through.
יֶהֶרְסוּ
Exodus 19:21 uses this form for people breaking through a boundary, showing the root’s sense of breaching.
meharesayikh: Your destroyers.
מְהָרְסַיִךְ
Isaiah 49:17 uses the same root for destroyers; here the verb names what the attack does to the towers.
מִגְדָּלָיִךְ
migdalayikh
GROWS FROM
גדל
gadal
To grow, become great, or be great.
“towers” in this verse is migdalayikh. The Hebrew word for tower belongs to the same family as words for growing and being great. The tower is greatness made visible and vertical, and the axes attack that height directly.
ALSO GROWS
gadal: To grow or become great.
גָּדַל
The verb shares the tower’s root and carries the sense of something rising or increasing.
gadol: Great or large.
גָּדוֹל
The adjective links the tower to greatness, the quality its height makes visible.
THE PATTERN
Scripture depicts fortified boundaries as structures that can be breached and brought down.
They will ruin the walls of Tyre and tear down her towers. I will scrape her dust from her and set her as a bare rock.And they burned the house of God, and broke through the wall of Jerusalem, and burned all its palaces with fire, and ruined all its delightful vessels.For the weapons of our campaign are not of the flesh, but mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds.THE THREAD
They will ruin the walls of Tyre and tear down her towers. I will scrape her dust from her and set her as a bare rock.The Hebrew root הרס (haras, tear down) also appears in 26:4, where Tyre’s towers are named as the object of demolition. Here verse 9 makes that collapse tactile: the siege engine is set against the wall, then axes strike the towers.
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