What Does Ezekiel 36:3 Mean?
Therefore prophesy, and say, Thus says the Lord GOD, because they have emptied you and swallowed you up on every side, so that you might be a possession for the remnant of the nations. You are lifted up on the lips of talkers, a spoken shame among the peoples.
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
Therefore prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because they have made you desolate, and swallowed you up on every side, that ye might be a possession unto the residue of the heathen, and ye are taken up in the lips of talkers, and are an infamy of the people:THE KEY
The Hebrew מוֹרָשָׁה (morashah, possession or inheritance) grows from יָרַשׁ (yarash, possess or inherit), whose same root can mean dispossess, so this inheritance carries expulsion inside it.
THE MEANING
The place that is yours is made desolate, consumed from every side, and turned into the possession of others. Its devastation also becomes public slander, so the taking reaches both the ground and the name spoken over it.
THE ROOT
מוֹרָשָׁה
morashah
GROWS FROM
ירש
To take possession or inherit; in a causative form, to dispossess or drive out.
מוֹרָשָׁה (morashah, possession or inheritance) comes from יָרַשׁ (yarash, possess or inherit). The same root can describe dispossessing someone, so the verse’s possession is not a neutral transfer: expulsion is inside the word.
ALSO GROWS
yarash: To take possession or inherit.
יָרַשׁ
This is the root behind the land becoming a possession for others.
horish: To dispossess or drive out.
הוֹרִישׁ
This causative form names the expulsion that can make another person an inheritor.
שַׁמּוֹת
shammot
GROWS FROM
שמם
To be desolate or devastated; also to be appalled.
“emptied” in this verse is shammot. This word-family can name both a wasted place and the appalled response to devastation. Here, the desolation becomes public as well as physical: it is carried into what people say about the land.
ALSO GROWS
shemamah: A desolate place or condition.
שְׁמָמָה
It makes the verse’s physical devastation visible as a condition of the land.
shamem: To become desolate or to be appalled.
שָׁמֵם
The same root can describe the ruined place and the shock its ruin provokes.
דִּבַּת
dibbat
GROWS FROM
דבב
Whispering or speech; a report that becomes slander.
“a spoken shame” in this verse is dibbat. דִּבַּת (dibbat, slander or evil report) turns the devastation into something said about the people. A related form describes lips being made to speak, bringing the verse’s public infamy down to the motion of speech itself.
ALSO GROWS
dibbah: A hostile report or slander.
דִּבָּה
This is the noun behind the infamy named in the verse.
dovēv: Causing lips to speak, as in Song of Solomon 7:9.
דּוֹבֵב
This related form connects the people’s infamy to speech moving from mouth to mouth.
THE PATTERN
A people can be wounded in their land and again in the public story told about them.
To make their land stunned, and a whistling of the ages. Everyone who crosses by it shall be stunned, and shake his head.You set us a reproach to our neighbors; a scorn and a derision to those who circle us.Flourishing are you when they revile you, and pursue you, and speak every evil word against you, lying, for my sake.THE THREAD
For I will drive out the nations from your face, and widen your borders. No man shall crave your land when you go up to be seen before the face of the LORD your God three times in the year.The word for possession in Ezekiel comes from יָרַשׁ (yarash, possess or inherit), the same root behind cast out in Exodus. The shared root exposes the force inside possession: one group’s inheritance can be made through another’s expulsion.
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