What Does Genesis 5:17 Mean?
And all the days of Mahalalel were eight hundred and ninety-five years, and he died.
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 all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and five years: and he died.THE KEY
The Hebrew closes 895 counted years with וַיָּמֹת, placing death inside the measure of the life.
THE MEANING
This verse holds a life’s full span and its ending in one account. However great the count, death remains part of the life being counted.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that an exceptionally long life escapes death: even 895 years end with “and he died.”
THE ROOT
וַיָּמֹת
wayyāmōṯ
GROWS FROM
מות
to die
“died” in this verse is wayyāmōṯ. The verb וַיָּמֹת comes from מות, the same consonants found in מָוֶת, “death,” and לָמוּת, “to die.” The shared root joins the ending of this counted life to the word for death itself.
ALSO GROWS
māweṯ: death
מָוֶת
This noun shares all three root consonants, making explicit the ending named by the verse’s verb.
lā-mûṯ: to die
לָמוּת
This infinitive preserves the same root in another form, connecting the verse’s completed death with the act of dying.
THE PATTERN
Even a life counted across its days remains finite, and death belongs within its measure.
And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.The days of our years, in them, are seventy years, or with strength eighty years; yet their span is toil and emptiness, for it is sheared away swiftly, and we take wing.And as it is laid up for people to die once, and after this, judgment.THE THREAD
And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.Seth’s account closes with the same Hebrew verb, וַיָּמֹת, from מות. The repeated root makes the different lifespans share one ending.
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