What Does Ezra 4:13 Mean?
Let it now be known to the king that if this city is built, and its walls are made whole again, then they will not pay toll, tribute, or custom, and so you will damage the revenue of the kings.
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
Be it known now unto the king, that, if this city be builded, and the walls set up again, then will they not pay toll, tribute, and custom, and so thou shalt endamage the revenue of the kings.THE KEY
The verse turns a city’s restoration into a threat by measuring its future in lost revenue.
THE MEANING
This voice treats a city’s rebuilding as a fiscal threat: once its walls stand, the king is told, his revenue will suffer. The verse shows how restoration can be narrated as injury when authority measures a community by the dues it sends upward. Its conditional wording leaves that forecast visible as a claim, not proof.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A confident report is not evidence: “Be it known” gives an accusation the sound of fact, while the loss remains conditional on the city being rebuilt.
THE ROOT
תִּתְבְּנֵא
titbenē
GROWS FROM
בנא
b-n-ʾ
To build, establish, or raise up.
“built” in this verse is titbenē. This Aramaic building word belongs to a Semitic word-family that can describe a household being established as well as a structure being raised. The city’s rebuilding therefore carries the sense of a community continuing to stand, not merely walls returning to their place.
ALSO GROWS
benā: To build.
בְּנָא
This verb names the construction at the center of the accusation.
ve’ibbaneh: “I may be built up.”
וְאִבָּנֶה
In Genesis 16:2, Sarah uses this form for a household being established through Hagar, showing how the building root can reach beyond walls to communal continuity.
יְדִיעַ
yedīa
GROWS FROM
ידע
y-d-ʿ
To know or perceive.
The root carries the sense of knowing and perceiving, but here the report presents a conditional forecast as something to be “known.” The opening sounds certain even as the claim itself depends on what may happen if the city is rebuilt.
ALSO GROWS
yeda: Know, perceive.
יְדַע
This basic form shows the knowing language beneath the report’s claim of certainty.
hodi’a: Make known, announce.
הוֹדִיעַ
This related form makes explicit the act of presenting information, the move the letter makes before its prediction is proven.
de’ah: Knowledge, perception.
דֵּעָה
This related noun keeps the root’s knowing-and-perceiving sense in view as the report frames its allegation.
THE PATTERN
When change threatens an established source of power or income, it can be framed as a loss to the whole community or ruler.
If we let him go on like this, all will lean their weight into him, and the Romans will come and lift away both our place and our nation.So that not only is our part in danger of being spoken down, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis should be counted as nothing, and her greatness taken down, whom all Asia and the inhabited earth hold in awe.THE THREAD
If we let him go on like this, all will lean their weight into him, and the Romans will come and lift away both our place and our nation.Ezra’s report says a rebuilt city will cost the kings revenue; this verse makes the same conditional leap from allowing change to the loss of political standing. In both, a possible shift in the social order is introduced as a prediction of institutional harm.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us