What Does Isaiah 23:7 Mean?
Is this your leaping city, whose days are from ancient days? Her feet shall carry her far away to sojourn.
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
Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? her own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn.THE KEY
Her long, joyful past cannot keep her at home: her own feet carry her into the life of a stranger.
THE MEANING
The verse holds together a city’s long joy and her movement away: her own feet carry her far from home to live as a sojourner. A familiar life can carry you so far from its place that you live as a stranger there. Age and joy describe what has been; they do not guarantee where you remain.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A long, joyful past guarantees that I will remain at home; this verse places that confidence beside a city carried far away by her own feet.
THE ROOT
לָגוּר
lagur
GROWS FROM
גּוּר
To dwell as an outsider; to sojourn.
“sojourn” in this verse is lagur. The word names more than travel: it is dwelling away from one’s own place as a stranger. The city’s destination is a changed condition of belonging, not just a distant location.
ALSO GROWS
ger: Sojourner; resident outsider.
גֵּר
This root noun names the person who lives in the status the city enters.
magor: Sojourning; a dwelling as an outsider.
מָגוֹר
This branch carries the root into the condition or place of dwelling, making the city’s distance a new kind of home.
מֵרָחוֹק
merachoq
GROWS FROM
רחק
To be distant or far away.
The word for distance belongs to a root that also forms a verb meaning to put far away or remove. So “afar off” holds more than measurement: the city’s movement places her beyond what was near.
ALSO GROWS
rachoq: Far; distant.
רָחוֹק
This adjective names the distance the city crosses.
hirchiq: To move far away; remove.
הִרְחִיק
This verb shows the same root can name the act of creating distance, not only the state of being far.
THE PATTERN
Scripture uses the stranger’s status to name a life lived away from secure home.
And there was hunger in the land, and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there, for the hunger was heavy in the land.Hear and respond to my prayer, LORD. Tilt your ear to my cry, and do not be deaf to my tears. For I am a sojourner with you, one who settles, like all my fathers.In trust all these died, not having brought home the promises, but seeing them from far off, and embracing them, and saying together that they were strangers and those passing through on the earth.THE THREAD
And there was hunger in the land, and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there, for the hunger was heavy in the land.Isaiah uses לָגוּר (lagur, to sojourn) from the root גּוּר (gur, to dwell as an outsider); Genesis uses that same root when Abram goes to Egypt to sojourn. Isaiah’s city is carried into the stranger’s life, while Genesis names sojourning as a life entered under famine’s pressure.
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