What Does Genesis 14:11 Mean?
And they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their food, and went their way.
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 they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their victuals, and went their way.THE KEY
The taking gathers a city’s acquired wealth and its food into one load, so even what sustains life becomes loot.
THE MEANING
The verse holds possessions and food together under one seizure: what a people owns and what keeps it fed can be gathered into the taker’s supply. Its starkness remains visible wherever power turns another’s necessities into portable wealth.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that stored abundance guarantees safety dissolves here: possessions and food can be stripped in the same act.
THE ROOT
רְכֻשׁ
rəḵuš
GROWS FROM
רכש
r-k-sh
To acquire or gather possessions.
The Hebrew family of “goods” carries the act of acquiring them. What one place has gathered can become, in an instant, something another power carries off.
ALSO GROWS
rāḵaš: to acquire, gain
רָכַשׁ
The verb keeps the work of acquisition inside the idea of possessions.
rəḵuš: possessions, substance
רְכֻשׁ
This is the word for the goods taken here; it also appears as “substance” in Genesis 15:14.
אָכְלָם
ʾokhlām
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
To eat or consume.
The Hebrew word means “their food,” from אכל, “to eat.” The line names not only loot but the seizure of what enters the mouth and sustains daily life.
ALSO GROWS
ʾākal: to eat, consume
אָכַל
The verb makes food the matter that is eaten, rather than an abstract store.
ʾōḵel: food
אֹכֶל
This noun shares the root of “their food,” keeping daily nourishment in view.
THE PATTERN
When power seizes what sustains others, their abundance becomes the taker’s supply and leaves the vulnerable exposed.
And they camped against them, and ruined the yield of the land, until you come to Gaza, and left no living for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor donkey.They covet fields and tear them away, and houses, and carry them off. So they press a man and his house, even a man and his inheritance.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
And also the nation they serve, I will judge, and afterward they will come out with great goods.Genesis 15:14 uses the same Hebrew word, רְכֻשׁ (rəḵuš), rendered “substance,” for what people carry out with them. The shared word makes possessions visible as portable wealth, seized here, carried into freedom there.
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