What Does Ezra 4:16 Mean?
We make it known to the king that if this city is built again, and its walls made whole, then by this means you will have no portion across the river.
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
We certify the king that, if this city be builded again, and the walls thereof set up, by this means thou shalt have no portion on this side the river.THE KEY
The warning treats belonging as a fixed allotment, framing one city’s restoration as another ruler’s dispossession.
THE MEANING
You hear a warning that sets the city’s rebuilding beside the threatened loss of the king’s portion beyond the river. Its certainty makes restoration sound like a zero-sum contest: as the city gains its walls, the king supposedly loses his share.
THE ROOT
חלק
ḥalaq
GROWS FROM
ח־ל־ק
To divide, apportion, or assign a share.
The Aramaic word means an allotted share, from a root that carries the action of dividing or apportioning. The warning makes the king’s belonging sound like a bounded portion that the city’s rebuilding can take away.
ALSO GROWS
ḥēleq: Portion, share, or lot.
חֵלֶק
This Hebrew cognate shows the share as an allotted part of a larger whole, the very belonging the warning says will be lost.
ḥālaq: To divide or apportion.
חָלַק
The root’s action is division: a portion is defined by how the whole is divided and who receives each part.
THE PATTERN
Power protects its place by casting another community’s restoration as a threat to its own share.
In it was written, It is heard among the nations, and Gashmu says it, that you and the Jews think to rebel. For this reason you are building the wall, so that you may be their king, according to these words.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.THE THREAD
The LORD is the portion of my share and of my cup; you hold fast my lot.The Aramaic חלק (ḥalaq) in this verse and the Hebrew חֵלֶק (ḥēleq) in Psalm 16:5 share the root ח־ל־ק and the sense of an allotted share. Here, a voice threatens that the king will lose his portion; Psalm 16:5 names the LORD as the portion, opening belonging beyond a ruler’s boundary.
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