What Does Joshua 17:13 Mean?
Yet it came to pass, when the children of Israel grew strong, that they set the Canaanites under the load, and did not utterly drive them out.
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
Yet it came to pass, when the children of Israel were waxen strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute; but did not utterly drive them out.THE KEY
The verb for “drive them out” shares its root with “inherit” and “possess,” binding the unfinished dispossession to the unfinished possession.
THE MEANING
Strength can arrive while the decisive work remains incomplete: here Israel puts the Canaanites under tribute but does not drive them out. The verse holds that violent, economically useful arrangement in view rather than treating strength as proof of completion.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that becoming strong means the work is finished: strength and an incomplete expulsion stand side by side.
THE ROOT
הוֹרִישׁוּ
hôrîšû
GROWS FROM
ירש
To take possession or inherit; in the causative form, to dispossess someone and so make possession possible.
English makes “drive them out” sound only like removal, but הוֹרִישׁוּ belongs to the root ירש, which also describes possessing or inheriting land. The same word-family holds dispossession and possession together: the expulsion is incomplete, and so is the possession it serves.
ALSO GROWS
yāraš: Inherit; possess
יָרַשׁ
The same root describes receiving the land as a possession, tying inheritance to the dispossession named here.
yerushah: Inheritance; possession
יְרֻשָּׁה
This noun names the possession at stake, showing that incomplete expulsion and incomplete inheritance belong to one root-family.
THE PATTERN
What remains in place can keep shaping the whole, even when it has been reduced to something manageable.
But if you will not drive out the settlers of the land from your face, then those you let remain of them shall be thorns in your eyes and goads in your sides, and they shall press you in the land where you settle.And it came to pass, when Israel grew strong, that they set the Canaanites to forced labor, and did not utterly drive them out.A little leaven leavens the whole kneaded mass.THE THREAD
Now therefore hear and respond, O Israel, to the statutes and the judgments that I train you in, to do them, that you may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers gives you.The Hebrew word translated “possess” here comes from the same root as “drive them out” in Joshua 17:13. The shared root reveals that the text joins dispossession with taking possession of the land.
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