What Does Hosea 7:3 Mean?
They make the king glad with their harm, and the princes with their lies.
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
They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies.THE KEY
When lies please those who rule, corruption has become part of power’s emotional life.
THE MEANING
This verse exposes a present pattern: wrongdoing delights the king, while lies please the princes. Authority can welcome corruption as a pleasure, allowing deception to shape the order everyone inhabits. The lie lives in what power accepts as well as in what a speaker says.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a leader’s approval makes an act good dissolves here: a ruler’s pleasure can reveal corruption.
THE ROOT
כַּחֲשֵׁיהֶם
kaḥăšêhem
GROWS FROM
כחש
To deny, dissemble, or deal falsely.
The word translated “lies” comes from a root that also means denying or feigning a posture. Its reach makes the court’s lie more than an isolated false sentence: it can be a practiced appearance that hides what is true.
ALSO GROWS
kiḥēš: Denied or dealt falsely.
כִּחֵשׁ
This verbal form shows the active distortion of truth beneath the noun translated “lies.”
yitkaḥăšū: They feign submission or dissemble.
יִתְכַּחֲשׁוּ
The same root can describe an outward performance that conceals what is true, sharpening the sense of lies as more than mistaken words.
יְשַׂמְּחוּ
yesammeḥū
GROWS FROM
שמח
To rejoice or be glad.
“make glad” in this verse is yesammeḥū. The verb says they cause the king to rejoice. The root also names gladness itself, revealing wrongdoing as an occasion for delight at court.
ALSO GROWS
sameaḥ: Glad or rejoicing.
שָׂמֵחַ
This describes the state of gladness that the verb in the verse causes.
simḥāh: Joy or gladness.
שִׂמְחָה
This noun shares the root and connects the rulers’ pleasure to the same word family as joy.
THE PATTERN
When authority welcomes falsehood, corruption spreads from a lie into the order that sustains it.
If a ruler hears and responds to lies, all who stand before him are restless.Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who set darkness for light, and light for darkness, who set bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!Who, knowing God's judgment of alignment, that those who do such things weigh as much as death, not only do them, but also take pleasure in those who practice them.THE THREAD
Ephraim encircles me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit. But Judah still treads with God, and is steady with the set-apart ones.The word translated “lies” here comes from the same כחש (kachash) root as the word in Hosea 7:3. In this verse, deception surrounds a relationship; in Hosea 7:3, the same kind of denial and dissembling pleases rulers.
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