What Does Ezekiel 6:3 Mean?
And say, You mountains of Israel, hear and respond to the word of the Lord GOD. Thus says the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the watercourses, and to the valleys. Look, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.
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 say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.THE KEY
The mountains are made to hear the very word that brings the sword, so the land itself stands within the judgment of its high places.
THE MEANING
The LORD’s address reaches beyond human hearers to mountains, hills, rivers, and valleys. The word announces a sword against this landscape and the destruction of its high places. The violence is direct: those places are brought down.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Elevation does not make a place or the worship held there untouchable; the high places stand under the announced sword.
THE ROOT
דָּבָר
dāḇār
GROWS FROM
דבר
d-b-r
To speak; as a noun, a word, matter, or thing.
English makes “word” sound like speech alone, while davar can also name a matter or thing. Here, the word the landscape hears announces the matter itself: sword and destruction.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: Spoke; declared.
דִּבֵּר
The spoken address is directed to the mountains and the rest of the land.
davar: Word, matter, or thing.
דָּבָר
The declaration and the event it names, judgment on the high places, belong together.
שִׁמְעוּ
shimʿū
GROWS FROM
שמע
sh-m-ʿ
To hear or listen; in some contexts, to heed or respond.
“hear and respond” in this verse is shimʿū. The command to hear is aimed at mountains, hills, rivers, and valleys, not only people. The land itself receives the announcement of what is coming upon it.
ALSO GROWS
shama: To hear or listen.
שָׁמַע
This is the root verb behind the command addressed to Israel’s terrain.
shemuah: Report, news, or tidings.
שְׁמוּעָה
The announced judgment is something heard and carried as a report.
חֶרֶב
ḥerev
GROWS FROM
חרב
ḥ-r-b
To become dry or desolate; to lay waste.
The consonants of cherev, “sword,” echo charav, “become desolate,” and chorbah, “ruin.” The sound connection lets the sword carry the land’s threatened desolation within its name.
ALSO GROWS
charav: To become desolate or ruined.
חָרֵב
It names the condition associated with the sword’s arrival.
chorbah: Ruin or desolation.
חָרְבָּה
It gives a name to the wasteland that the announced violence brings.
THE PATTERN
Scripture treats the land as a participant in human worship and its consequences.
And I will wipe out your high places, and cut down your images, and set your corpses upon the corpses of your idols, and my living soul shall recoil from you.They slaughter upon the heads of the mountains and send up smoke upon the hills, beneath oaks and poplars and terebinths, for their shade is good. Therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your brides shall commit adultery.For we know that the whole creation groans together and labors together in the pangs of birth until now.THE THREAD
In all the places where you settle, the cities shall be dried out, and the high places shall be desolate, so that your altars may be dried out and made desolate, and your idols may be broken and made to stop, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be wiped out.The next verse repeats “high places” and names the altars, idols, and images there. It shows what the announced destruction reaches: the worship objects and works held upon the land.
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