What Does Genesis 6:14 Mean?
Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; make nests in the ark, and cover it within and without with pitch.
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
Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.THE KEY
The word for pitching the ark carries the sense of covering, and the coating itself comes from that same root: the vessel is protected by an act of covering.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to what carries you through a flood: its protection reaches both the hidden interior and the visible exterior. The covering leaves no side of the vessel exposed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that safety comes from an outer shell alone: the ark is covered within and without.
THE ROOT
וְכָפַרְתָּ
wekafarta
GROWS FROM
כפר
k-p-r
Cover, coat over.
“cover” in this verse is wekafarta. The verb translated “pitch it” and the noun translated “pitch” share the root כפר (k-p-r, covering). English makes one an action and the other a substance; Hebrew ties the coating to the act of covering, sealing the ark within and without.
ALSO GROWS
kopher: Pitch, a coating substance.
כֹּפֶר
This is the substance applied to the ark; its root links the material to the act of covering.
kipper: Cover; make atonement.
כִּפֶּר
The same root appears in the language of covering and atonement, opening a connection between coating the vessel and covering what is exposed.
THE PATTERN
Covering protects what is vulnerable by enclosing it or holding it from exposure.
And those who came in, male and female of all flesh, came as God had commanded him, and the LORD shut him in.And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of reeds, and smeared it with bitumen and pitch, and set the child in it, and set it among the rushes on the lip of the river.And above all, hold love stretched out among yourselves, for love covers a multitude of missed marks.THE THREAD
For on that day the priest makes a covering for you, to cleanse you, so that you may be clean from all your shortcomings before the LORD.The verb translated “make an atonement” comes from כפר (k-p-r, covering), the same root as the ark’s coating. That shared root lets the pitch reveal a deeper image of covering what is vulnerable.
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