What Does Ezra 2:20 Mean?
The children of Gibbar, ninety-five.
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
The children of Gibbar, ninety and five.THE KEY
The verse holds a household’s name and its exact number together, so the tally does not erase the people it counts.
THE MEANING
Your place in a people is not dissolved by being counted among them: this line preserves both the household’s name and its number. Gibbar is associated with the Hebrew root for strength and prevailing, giving this brief count a name with its own resonance.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A tally necessarily erases identity.
THE ROOT
גִּבָּר
Gibbār
GROWS FROM
גבר
To be strong; to prevail.
The name Gibbar is associated with גבר, “to be strong, to prevail,” though the precise derivation of this rare name is uncertain. The same root appears in words for a man and a mighty one, so the household’s name stands beside its count with an echo of strength.
ALSO GROWS
gever: Man; a strong man.
גֶּבֶר
This branch carries the root’s sense of strength into the language for a person, echoing the household name.
gibbôr: Mighty one; warrior.
גִּבּוֹר
This familiar branch makes the strength in the root audible in another form of the same three-letter seed.
THE PATTERN
Being counted within a whole does not erase particularity: a count and a name can stand together.
He counts the number of the stars; he calls each of them by name.But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not shrink, for you surpass many sparrows.THE THREAD
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of the youth.The name Gibbar is associated with גבר (g-b-r), the root heard in גִּבּוֹר (gibbôr), “mighty one,” translated here as “mighty man.” Psalm 127 places children alongside that strength-root, opening Ezra’s household name as more than a label beside a number.
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