What Does Joshua 15:57 Mean?
Cain, Gibeah, and Timnah; ten cities with their courtyards.
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
Cain, Gibeah, and Timnah; ten cities with their villages:THE KEY
The Hebrew word translated “villages” can also mean an enclosure or court, so this count holds the smaller settlements together with the cities.
THE MEANING
Cain, Gibeah, and Timnah sit within a count of ten cities and their villages. The verse holds each named city together with the surrounding settlements as one inhabited landscape.
THE ROOT
חֲצֵרֵיהֶן
ḥaṣērêhen
GROWS FROM
חצר
Enclosure or court; also a settlement or unwalled village.
“courtyards” in this verse is ḥaṣērêhen. The city does not stand alone here: the word for “villages” carries the sense of an enclosure or settled court. The count includes those inhabited places alongside the named cities, rather than reducing the landscape to city names.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṣēr: Court, enclosure, or settlement.
חָצֵר
The singular form shows the range behind the verse’s word for villages: a bounded place can also be a dwelling place.
ḥaṣērîm: Settlements or villages.
חֲצֵרִים
This plural form shares the same consonants and names the smaller inhabited places counted with a city.
גִּבְעָה
givʿāh
GROWS FROM
גבע
Hill or raised ground.
Gibeah’s name carries the shape of the land in its own word: a hill. The list therefore preserves more than place labels; one of its names still speaks of the terrain it names.
ALSO GROWS
gevaʿ: Hill or mound.
גֶּבַע
This form shares the root consonants and makes the raised-ground sense explicit.
givʿōn: Gibeon, a hill-town name.
גִּבְעוֹן
This related place name carries the same גבע consonants and the hill sense found in Gibeah.
THE PATTERN
A populated place is counted as a whole network, with villages belonging in the same account as cities.
And the border of the children of Reuben was Jordan, and the border. This was the inheritance of the children of Reuben according to their families, the cities and their villages.And Jesus went around all the cities and villages, teaching in their gatherings, heralding the good news of the governance, and healing every sickness and every weakness among the people.And wherever he went, into villages, or cities, or fields, they laid the ones without strength in the marketplaces, and urged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak, and as many as touched him were delivered.THE THREAD
And Lebaoth, and Shilhim, and Ain, and Rimmon; all the cities are twenty and nine, with their courtyards.The Hebrew word חצר appears again behind “villages,” repeating the same settlement language in another count of Judah’s cities. Together, the verses make the surrounding settlements part of the landscape being named, rather than leaving the cities isolated.
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