What Does Ezekiel 38:13 Mean?
Sheba, and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all its young lions, will say to you, Have you come to take spoil? Have you gathered your assembly to take prey, to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to take great spoil?
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
Sheba, and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all the young lions thereof, shall say unto thee, Art thou come to take a spoil? hast thou gathered thy company to take a prey? to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to take a great spoil?THE KEY
The Hebrew asks whether the invader has come “to plunder plunder,” making the gathering’s purpose impossible to miss.
THE MEANING
You hear the question put to a force arriving with others’ possessions in view: what have you gathered yourselves to carry away? Silver, gold, livestock, and goods make the appetite concrete, while the repeated plunder language exposes the purpose beneath the gathering. The verse speaks wherever organized power is measured by what it can seize.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that a large, organized force has a noble purpose simply because it is united: the question names what it comes to seize.
THE ROOT
לִשְׁלֹל שָׁלָל
lishlol shalal
GROWS FROM
שלל
To strip away or plunder; as a noun, the goods seized as booty.
“take a spoil” in this verse is lishlol shalal. In the Hebrew phrase “to plunder plunder,” both the action and its object grow from שׁלל (shalal, plunder or booty). The closing “to plunder a great spoil” returns to the same seed, leaving seizure at the passage’s blunt center.
ALSO GROWS
lishlol: The act of seizing goods as plunder.
לִשְׁלֹל
It supplies the action in “to take a spoil,” echoing the noun that follows it.
shalal: Goods taken by plunder.
שָׁלָל
This noun appears with the verb and returns in “a great spoil,” keeping the plunder itself at the center of the question.
קְהָלֶךָ
qehālekha
GROWS FROM
קהל
To assemble or gather; an assembly gathered together.
The phrase rendered “gathered thy company” joins לִקְהַל (liqhal, to assemble) with קְהָלֶךָ (qehālekha, your assembly), forms from the same root. The group and the act of convening it are linguistically joined, and the question asks what this organized unity has gathered to take.
ALSO GROWS
liqhal: The act of gathering or assembling.
לִקְהַל
In this verse it pairs with “your assembly,” making the phrase echo “to gather your gathering.”
qehālekha: The gathered company or assembly.
קְהָלֶךָ
This names the group formed by the gathering action, from the same root.
THE PATTERN
Plunder announces a group’s aim in the goods it seeks, and the harm it leaves becomes a claim against it.
We find all weighty wealth, and fill our houses with what is stripped.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.Because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the peoples will plunder you, from the blood of men, and the violence of the land, of the city, and of all who settle in it.THE THREAD
They shall take no wood from the field, nor cut any from the forests, for they shall burn the weapons with fire. And they shall plunder those who plundered them, and strip those who stripped them, says the Lord GOD.The same root שָׁלַל (shalal, plunder) shifts who acts and who is acted upon: the plunderers become the plundered. It answers Ezekiel 38:13’s “to plunder plunder” with a reversal in who carries off the spoil.
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