What Does Ezra 2:9 Mean?
The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and sixty.
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 Zaccai, seven hundred and threescore.THE KEY
The census gives this household a number, while “Zaccai” carries the Hebrew word-family of cleanness and clarity.
THE MEANING
A household is not swallowed by the whole: this line keeps its name beside its count. Your place among people can be particular and shared, visible without being reduced to a number.
THE ROOT
זַכַּי
Zakkay
GROWS FROM
זכה
Be clean or clear; in some forms, be vindicated.
“Zaccai” in this verse is Zakkay. Zakkay belongs to the זכה word-family, which carries the sense of being clean or clear. This line holds the household’s name and its count together, letting lineage and name-nature remain visible side by side.
ALSO GROWS
Zakkay: A personal name commonly connected with cleanness or innocence.
זַכַּי
This is the name preserved in the census, carrying the root’s clean or clear sense into the household’s identity.
yizkeh: A verb form from זכה, meaning to be clean or clear.
יִזְכֶּה
This form appears in Job 15:14, making the root’s sense audible beyond the name itself.
THE PATTERN
Scripture makes a people visible by preserving both shared belonging and particular count.
The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and sixty.Then those who gladly took his word in were immersed, and that day about three thousand living souls were added to them.But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not shrink, for you surpass many sparrows.THE THREAD
What is a frail one, that he should be clean? And the one born of a woman, that he should be aligned?Job uses יִזְכֶּה (yizkeh, “be clean”) from the same זכה root linked to Zaccai. The name’s clean or clear word-family thus reaches beyond identification into a question of human cleanness.
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