What Does Joshua 15:14 Mean?
And Caleb drove out from there the three sons of Anak, Sheshai, and Ahiman, and Talmai, the children of Anak.
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 Caleb drove thence the three sons of Anak, Sheshai, and Ahiman, and Talmai, the children of Anak.THE KEY
The Hebrew root behind “drove out” also means “inherit” or “take possession,” holding Caleb’s gain and the Anakim’s expulsion together.
THE MEANING
This verse keeps the violence of taking land in view: Caleb’s possession comes through forcing three named men out. The Hebrew verb also carries the sense of inheriting or taking possession, so the gain on one side and the loss on the other are inseparable in the sentence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that possession is always a clean gain: here the verb holds expulsion and inheritance together.
THE ROOT
וַיֹּרֶשׁ
vayyoresh
GROWS FROM
י־ר־שׁ
y-r-sh
The root names taking possession or inheriting; in the Hiphil form used here, it means to dispossess someone else.
“drove out from there” in this verse is vayyoresh. English “drove out” shows the removal, while this root also carries the idea of taking possession or inheriting. The same root holds both sides of the transfer: what Caleb gains is bound to the expulsion of those named.
ALSO GROWS
yārash: Inherit; take possession.
יָרַשׁ
This is the acquiring sense of the root, the other side of the action named in the verse.
hôrîsh: Dispossess; drive out.
הוֹרִישׁ
This causative form names the removal expressed by “drove out.”
yerushah: Inheritance; possession.
יְרֻשָּׁה
This noun makes explicit the taking-possession meaning held within the root.
THE PATTERN
A claim to land can be seen as inheritance from one side and the expulsion of its prior occupants from the other.
A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim; but the LORD destroyed them from before them, and they drove them out, and settled in their place.You, with your hand, drove out the nations and planted them; you broke the peoples and sent them away.Which also our fathers, having brought it in, took hold of in turn with Jesus, into the holding of the nations, whom God thrust out before the face of our fathers, until the days of David.THE THREAD
A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim; but the LORD destroyed them from before them, and they drove them out, and settled in their place.Deuteronomy uses the same ירשׁ (y-r-sh, “inherit” or “take possession”; here, “dispossess”) root while describing a people tall as the Anakim and those who settle in their place. The shared root makes “drove out” and “succeeded them” two faces of one transfer.
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