What Does Ezekiel 31:2 Mean?
Son of man, speak to the Great House, king of Egypt, and to his roaring multitude. Whom are you like in your greatness?
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
Son of man, speak unto Pharaoh king of Egypt, and to his multitude; Whom art thou like in thy greatness?THE KEY
Greatness is not self-defining; the verse asks what a towering life resembles.
THE MEANING
That question meets you wherever your own stature feels decisive: what does it resemble? Greatness is real, but it remains something measured against a wider life, not a standard that defines itself. The cedar image that follows gives the scale a shape: towering, nourished, and still within a larger order.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that being great makes you incomparable or self-defining.
THE ROOT
בְּגָדְלֶךָ
begadlekha
GROWS FROM
גדל
grow, become great
The root keeps greatness tied to growth: scale is something that has risen, not an essence that makes its bearer ultimate. The cedar image that follows makes that height visible, and therefore comparable.
ALSO GROWS
gadal: grow, become great
גָּדַל
It shows greatness as something that develops and rises, rather than a status beyond measure.
gadol: great, large
גָּדוֹל
This adjective shares the root and names the scale the question puts under comparison.
דָּמִיתָ
damita
GROWS FROM
דמה
be like, resemble, compare
“like” in this verse is damita. The Hebrew verb makes the question about resemblance, not just magnitude: what does this greatness resemble? Its wording makes greatness relational, with its character visible through what it mirrors.
ALSO GROWS
damah: be like, resemble
דָּמָה
This verb form shares the root and makes explicit the comparison carried by the question.
lehidamot: resemble, become like
לְהִדָּמוֹת
This form keeps resemblance active: likeness describes a relation, not merely a label.
THE PATTERN
Greatness that takes its own height as final remains subject to being brought low.
For the day of the LORD of hosts shall be upon every one who swells and is high, and upon every one who is lifted up; and he shall be brought low.Swelling goes before breaking, and a breath lifted high goes before a stumbling.But he gives greater favor. Therefore it says, God sets himself against those who lift themselves high, and gives favor to those made low.THE THREAD
Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness cannot be searched out.Ezekiel’s “greatness” (בְּגָדְלֶךָ, begadlekha) and the psalm’s “greatness” (גְּדֻלָּתוֹ, gedullato) belong to the same גדל root family. The shared word opens the question beyond Pharaoh’s scale toward a greatness no comparison can exhaust.
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