What Does Genesis 13:17 Mean?
Rise, walk through the land in its length and in its breadth, for I will give it to you.
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
Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.THE KEY
The gift is promised for the future, yet its full breadth is encountered through the present act of walking across the land.
THE MEANING
The promise meets you as a space to cross: rise and move through the land’s full reach while its giving remains in the speaker’s pledge. Its breadth is not abstract here; it is ground the addressed person is told to traverse.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A promised thing need not already be in hand to be encountered as real; here its extent is traversed under a pledge of later giving.
THE ROOT
וּלְרָחְבָּהּ
u-le-rachbah
GROWS FROM
רחב
rachav
To be broad, widen, or become spacious.
The word for breadth grows from a root that also describes becoming wide or spacious. The land’s dimension is therefore more than a measurement: it carries the sense of room opening across its full extent.
ALSO GROWS
rachav: Broad, wide.
רָחָב
This adjective makes explicit the quality carried in the land’s breadth.
merchav: A broad place, an open expanse.
מֶרְחָב
The same root can name a spacious place, linking the land’s breadth with the experience of room.
הִתְהַלֵּךְ
hithallekh
GROWS FROM
הלך
halakh
To go or walk.
“walk through” in this verse is hithallekh. The command describes movement through the land, not simply a view of it from afar. The promise is met on the ground, through passage across its extent.
ALSO GROWS
holekh: Going, walking; one who goes.
הוֹלֵךְ
This form keeps the verse’s focus on a person moving through the promised space.
halikhah: Walking, going.
הֲלִיכָה
The noun preserves the connection between the land and the act of traversing it.
אֶתְּנֶנָּה
ettenennah
GROWS FROM
נתן
natan
To give, set, or place.
“give” in this verse is ettenennah. The pledge keeps the giver as the source of the land; its extent is not presented as something the walker makes or earns. The root also carries the sense of setting or placing, keeping gift and place close together.
ALSO GROWS
mattanah: Gift.
מַתָּנָה
This related noun makes the giving in the verse sound like a gift rather than self-acquisition.
netinah: Giving, a bestowal.
נְתִינָה
This branch highlights the act of giving that remains attached to the land’s promise.
THE PATTERN
A promised inheritance becomes tangible through embodied presence and movement across its ground.
Every place where the sole of your foot treads will be yours. From the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, to the sea at your back will be your border.Every place the sole of your foot treads, I have given to you, as I spoke to Moses.By trust he dwelt alongside in the land of promise, as in another's land, settling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, co-heirs of the same promise.THE THREAD
He brings me out into a broad place; he pulls me loose, because he delights in me.The root רָחַב (rachav, “to be broad”) names the land’s breadth here and also forms מֶרְחָב (merchav, “broad place”) in Psalm 18:19. The shared root turns breadth from a measurement into room: an expanse opened after constriction.
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