What Does Ezra 2:32 Mean?
The children of Harim, three hundred and twenty.
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 Harim, three hundred and twenty.THE KEY
The roll call preserves identity in two forms at once: a name linked to devotion and a number too specific for anonymity.
THE MEANING
This verse keeps Harim’s descendants in view as a named household with a recorded count of 320. Their name is commonly linked to a Hebrew root for what is devoted or placed under a ban, giving this brief entry a charged undertone.
THE ROOT
חָרִם
ḥārim
GROWS FROM
חרם
ḥ-r-m
To devote or place under a ban; in some contexts, to devote to destruction.
The name Harim is commonly connected to חרם, a root whose range includes devotion and irrevocable prohibition. That gives this family name a sharper undertone than a label alone, though the verse does not tell us which shade applies here.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāram: To devote or place under a ban.
חָרַם
This verb shows the root as an action, giving Harim’s name a possible sense of devotion or being set apart.
ḥērem: A devoted thing or something placed under a ban.
חֵרֶם
This noun appears in Leviticus 27:28, where the root names what is irrevocably devoted.
THE PATTERN
Belonging is made concrete when a name and a count hold particular people in view.
Lift up the head of all the assembly of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, by the number of their names, every male, head by head.But now, thus says the LORD, who created you, O Jacob, and who shaped you, O Israel. Do not fear, for I have bought you back; I have called you by your name; you are mine.But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not shrink, for you surpass many sparrows.THE THREAD
But no sealed-away thing, which a man seals away to the LORD from all that he has, of man and beast, and of the field of his holding, is sold or bought back; every sealed-away thing is most set apart to the LORD.Harim is commonly connected to חרם (ḥ-r-m), the root behind “devoted thing” and “devote” in this verse. Leviticus shows the root’s force: what is devoted is claimed irrevocably, though Ezra’s list alone does not establish that this meaning describes the household.
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