What Does Genesis 15:21 Mean?
And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.
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 the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.THE KEY
The covenant’s promised ground is already inhabited: scripture names the people there instead of making the land sound empty.
THE MEANING
The line keeps the inhabitants visible alongside the promised land; they do not disappear into an abstract idea of inheritance. The reader encounters a promise attached to occupied ground, where real peoples are named.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that promised land is vacant or unclaimed is undone by the list itself.
THE ROOT
הַכְּנַעֲנִי
ha-Kenaʿani
GROWS FROM
כ־נ־ע
k-n-ʿ
To bend low, be brought low, humble, or subdue; traditionally associated with the name Canaan.
“Canaanites” in this verse is ha-Kenaʿani. The name Canaan is traditionally connected to כנע, the language of being brought low, though the ethnonym’s derivation is uncertain. That possible echo adds a shade to the name without turning the verse’s named people into a metaphor.
ALSO GROWS
kanaʿ: To be humbled, brought low, or subdued.
כָּנַע
This verb supplies the traditional root association behind Canaan’s name, though it does not establish the ethnonym’s origin with certainty.
Kenaʿan: Canaan, the land and name.
כְּנַעַן
The land-name is traditionally linked to כנע and is preserved in the people-name.
Kenaʿani: A Canaanite, an inhabitant of Canaan.
כְּנַעֲנִי
This is the Hebrew people-name represented by “Canaanites” in the verse.
THE PATTERN
A land promise stays concrete by keeping real ground and its inhabitants or nonpossession in view.
And I have come down to snatch them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land into a good and wide land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.And he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a footstep to set his foot upon. Yet he promised to give it to him, to hold as his own, and to his seed after him, while he was still childless.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
On that day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram, saying, To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.This verse sets the covenant and the land’s boundaries; 15:21 names four of the peoples already living there. Together, they make the promise concrete and inhabited.
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