What Does Genesis 34:9 Mean?
And join yourselves to us in marriage, and give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves.
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 make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you.THE KEY
The offer calls the alliance mutual, but its grammar makes daughters the things each household gives and takes.
THE MEANING
This verse presents marriage as a bond between households: one side gives daughters, the other takes them, and the exchange reverses. The verb translated “make marriages” names becoming kin through marriage, while the sentence places daughters in the grammatical position of those transferred. Reciprocity is plain; the daughters have no speaking place in the offer.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It unsettles the assumption that an exchange is mutual simply because both sides give and take: the daughters are named as transferred, but not as speakers.
THE ROOT
וְהִתְחַתְּנוּ
wehitḥattenu
GROWS FROM
ח־ת־ן
ḥ-t-n
To form kinship through marriage; to become in-laws.
“join yourselves to us in marriage” in this verse is wehitḥattenu. The verb’s root opens “marriages” into a change of relationship between families: the two sides become kin. That meaning sits beside the verse’s give-and-take language, which shows how this proposed kinship is arranged.
ALSO GROWS
ḥātān: A man joined to another family through marriage.
חָתָן
This branch makes the new family relationship inside “intermarry” visible.
ḥōtēn: A man related through his child’s marriage.
חֹתֵן
The root names kinship across the marriage, beyond the two people being joined.
תִּתְּנוּ
tittenu
GROWS FROM
נ־ת־ן
n-t-n
To give, set, or place.
The Hebrew verb belongs to the root נתן (natan, נָתַן, give, set, place). Here, daughters are the direct objects of giving; that grammar gives the proposed alliance its concrete shape.
ALSO GROWS
natan: The root’s basic verb.
נָתַן
The verse uses this root to describe one side’s part in the exchange.
mattan: Something given.
מַתָּן
This related noun echoes the giving language that frames the daughters as what passes between households.
תִּקְחוּ
tiqḥu
GROWS FROM
ל־ק־ח
l-q-ḥ
To take or receive.
The verse pairs לָקַח (laqach, לָקַח, take or receive) with נתן (natan, נָתַן, give, set, place). Together, the verbs make the proposed reciprocity unmistakable while keeping the daughters as the ones who move between households.
ALSO GROWS
laqach: The root’s basic verb.
לָקַח
This is the verb used for taking the other household’s daughters.
laqûaḥ: One who or that which is taken.
לָקוּחַ
This related form makes the passive side of the action audible: someone is received into another’s household.
THE PATTERN
Marriage is described as a joining that reaches beyond a couple to bind lives and households.
But you shall go to my land, and to my land of birth, and take a wife for my son Isaac.And they took for themselves wives from the women of Moab, one named Orpah, and the second named Ruth. And they settled there about ten years.So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What God has yoked together, let no one pull apart.THE THREAD
But you shall go to my land, and to my land of birth, and take a wife for my son Isaac.“Take” translates the same Hebrew root ל־ק־ח (l-q-ḥ) as “take” in Genesis 34:9. Here, too, marriage is expressed through receiving a woman into a family; the surrounding words reveal how each passage frames that joining.
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