What Does Ezekiel 27:21 Mean?
Arabia and all the lifted ones of Kedar were the traders of your hand; in lambs, rams, and goats they traded with you.
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
Arabia, and all the princes of Kedar, they occupied with thee in lambs, and rams, and goats: in these were they thy merchants.THE KEY
The flocks make visible that Tyre’s wealth flows through the work and goods of many lands.
THE MEANING
Your prosperity is woven from what others raise and bring within reach. Lambs, rams, and goats make that exchange concrete: wealth moves through many hands.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse dissolves the belief that what you possess is wholly self-made and self-contained.
THE ROOT
סֹחֲרֵי
sōḥărê
GROWS FROM
סחר
s-ḥ-r
To go about for trade; to traffic in goods.
“traders; traded” in this verse is sōḥărê. The verse repeats this trade-root for those who deal in the flocks, keeping their movement through a network in view. “Merchants” can sound like a static title in English; the root carries the activity of exchange.
ALSO GROWS
sōḥēr: Merchant, trader.
סֹחֵר
This is the person moving goods through the exchange named by the root.
səḥōrāh: Merchandise, goods for trade.
סְחֹרָה
This branch makes clear that the animals are not incidental details: they are the goods circulating through the network.
THE PATTERN
A community’s abundance and vulnerability both travel through the goods other people bring and buy.
And all the earth came into Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, for the hunger gripped hard in all the earth.She is like the merchant ships; from afar she brings her bread.And the traders of the earth shall weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their cargo any longer.THE THREAD
Tarshish was your trader for the abundance of all wealth; silver, iron, tin, and lead they set down in the rows of your wares.The word for “merchant” here comes from the same Hebrew root as in Ezekiel 27:21. There, flocks are the goods moving through the network; here, metals show how far that network reaches.
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