What Does Genesis 47:13 Mean?
And there was no bread in all the land, for the hunger was very heavy, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan fainted from before the face of the hunger.
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 there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.THE KEY
The famine is called “heavy”: hunger becomes a weight pressing on the whole land.
THE MEANING
When bread is absent, scarcity weighs on whole territories; neither Egypt nor Canaan is spared. The land itself languishes under the pressure, showing how hunger reaches beyond any one household.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Scarcity is not only a private hardship for individuals; this verse shows whole lands fainting under its weight.
THE ROOT
כָּבֵד
kaved
GROWS FROM
כבד
k-b-d
To be heavy or weighty.
The famine is described as heavy, a load that presses beyond one household until the land itself languishes. The same root gives kavod, “weight” and “honor,” so the English “sore” can hide the verse’s image of hunger as weight.
ALSO GROWS
kavod: Weight, honor, or glory.
כָּבוֹד
This branch makes the weight-language audible beneath the famine’s severity.
kibbed: To honor or treat as weighty.
כִּבֵּד
It carries the same root’s sense of assigning weight, echoing the burden famine lays across the land.
THE PATTERN
When provision fails, its weight crosses borders and makes whole regions vulnerable.
And there shall rise after them seven years of hunger, and all the fullness shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt, and the hunger shall consume the land.And it came to be in the days when the judges judged, that there was hunger in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the field of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons.And one of them named Agabus stood up, and made a sign through the breath that a great hunger would come upon all the world, which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar.THE THREAD
And the LORD said to Moses, Pharaoh's heart is heavy; he refuses to let the people go.Genesis calls the famine כָּבֵד (kaved), “heavy”; the same כבד root describes Pharaoh’s heart, rendered “hardened” here. The shared weight-image links a land pressed by hunger with a heart that refuses to release the people.
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