What Does Isaiah 50:1 Mean?
Thus says the LORD, Where is the bill of your mother's cutting away, whom I have sent away? Or to which of my creditors have I sold you? Behold, for your crookedness you have sold yourselves, and for your rebellions your mother has been sent away.
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
Thus saith the LORD, Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.THE KEY
The repeated Hebrew root for “sell” turns attention from an imagined buyer to the crookedness under which the reader is sold.
THE MEANING
The verse asks the reader to identify a divorce document or creditor behind the rupture, then names crookedness and rebellion as its cause. The sale and separation are tied to the reader’s own actions, not to an outside creditor’s claim.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that God has handed you over because someone else holds a debt claim on you; the verse dismisses the creditor and names your crookedness as the cause.
THE ROOT
נִמְכַּרְתֶּם
nimkartem
GROWS FROM
מכר
To sell or transfer into another’s possession.
The question first uses מָכַרְתִּי (“I sold you”), then shifts to נִמְכַּרְתֶּם (“you were sold”), rendered in the KJV as “sold yourselves.” The repeated מכר root keeps the sale in view while the question denies that an outside creditor owns a claim over you.
ALSO GROWS
makhartî: I sold.
מָכַרְתִּי
This is the same root in the verse’s question about whom the LORD supposedly sold the people to.
mimkar: A sale or something sold.
מִמְכָּר
This noun from the same root makes the transaction itself visible in the verse’s repeated sale language.
כְּרִיתוּת
keritut
GROWS FROM
כרת
To cut or cut off.
“cutting away” in this verse is keritut. The word for “divorcement” grows from כרת, the root of cutting off. That same root forms the phrase “cut a covenant,” so the image carries both severance and the language of a bond being made.
ALSO GROWS
karat: To cut or cut off.
כָּרַת
This is the root verb inside כְּרִיתוּת, expressing divorce as severance.
karat berit: To cut a covenant; to establish a covenant.
כָּרַת בְּרִית
The same cutting root can mark a binding bond, revealing the relational force inside the word for divorce.
THE PATTERN
Rupture and bondage are traced to the direction of human action, not to an outside creditor’s claim.
Have you not made this for yourself, by letting go of the LORD your God, when he led you on the road?But your crookedness has cut between you and your God, and your shortcomings have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.Do you not know that to the one you set yourselves beside as servants for hearing and response, his servants you are, the one you hear and respond to; whether of falling short unto death, or of hearing and response unto alignment?THE THREAD
When a man takes a wife and marries her, and if she finds no favor in his eyes, because he finds some nakedness in her, then he writes her a writ of cutting away, places it in her hand, and sends her out of his house.Deuteronomy names the document Isaiah asks about with the phrase ספר כריתות, “a writing of cutting off,” from כרת. Isaiah uses that severance image while locating the rupture in crookedness and rebellion.
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