What Does Ezra 7:20 Mean?
And whatever more is needed for the house of your God, which you have occasion to give, give it from the king's storehouse.
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
And whatsoever more shall be needful for the house of thy God, which thou shalt have occasion to bestow, bestow it out of the king’s treasure house.THE KEY
The repeated “bestow” makes release the bridge between a named need and a storehouse already full.
THE MEANING
A need in God’s house meets provision held in a treasury. The repeated act of giving is the hinge: what is stored becomes available when it is released. The verse speaks now wherever sacred work depends on provision moving into use.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that God’s work must go without when the person carrying the need cannot supply it personally; the verse points to a storehouse beyond that person’s own resources.
THE ROOT
למנדב תנדב
lemindab tindab
GROWS FROM
נדב
n-d-b
To give willingly or contribute freely.
“give” in this verse is lemindab tindab. Both “to bestow” and “bestow” come from נדב (nadav), the root of willing contribution. The same root names both the freewill gift and the willing giver, so the repeated giving carries the sense of abundance released into a concrete need.
ALSO GROWS
nedavah: A freewill offering or voluntary gift.
נְדָבָה
Ezra 7:16 uses this word for the people’s offering; here the same root describes giving from the king’s treasury.
nadiv: Willing or generous; also noble.
נָדִיב
This branch reveals the willing quality carried by the act of giving in the verse.
THE PATTERN
What is held in store becomes provision for a shared need through willing release.
The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD, every man and woman whose heart made them free-hearted to bring for all manner of work, which the LORD had commanded to be made by the hand of Moses.For none among them lacked, for as many as owned fields or houses sold them and carried the prices of what was sold, and set them down at the feet of the sent ones, and it was given out to each as anyone had need.Each one, as his heart has taken hold, so let him give, not from grief or from pressure, for God loves a glad giver.THE THREAD
And all the silver and gold that you can find in all the province of Babylon, with the willing offering of the people and the priests, who freely give for the house of their God that is in Jerusalem.Ezra 7:16 uses the same root, נדב (nadav), in “freewill offering” and “offering willingly.” The royal treasury in this verse stands alongside those willing gifts as provision for the same house.
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