What Does Joshua 21:16 Mean?
And Ain with her pastures, and Juttah with her pastures, and Beth-shemesh with her pastures; nine cities out of those two tribes.
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 Ain with her suburbs, and Juttah with her suburbs, and Beth-shemesh with her suburbs; nine cities out of those two tribes.THE KEY
This verse counts a dwelling together with the land around it, and one city’s name, Ain, carries the Hebrew word for a spring.
THE MEANING
The verse names a place to dwell along with the surrounding ground, and Ain carries the image of a spring. It gives habitation a fuller shape: a settled place held together with the space and life around it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A home is only its enclosed buildings, and the surrounding space is incidental.
THE ROOT
עַיִן
ʿayin
GROWS FROM
עין
ʿayin
Eye; spring or fountain.
Hebrew עַיִן names both the eye and a spring, joining sight with a place where water emerges. The city-name preserves that image beneath the English spelling “Ain.”
ALSO GROWS
eye: The organ of sight.
עַיִן
This branch reveals a meaning the English city-name does not show: Ain shares its word with the eye.
ʿayin: A source of water.
עַיִן
This branch gives Ain the nature of a spring, a place-name carrying an image of water within a list of dwellings.
THE PATTERN
A dwelling’s provision includes both its settled place and the space marked out around it.
Command the children of Israel to give the Levites cities to settle in from the inheritance of their holding, and you shall also give the Levites pasturelands for the cities round about them.The cords fall to me in sweet places; indeed, my inheritance is beautiful.And he made from one blood every nation of humankind to settle upon all the face of the earth, marking out their fitted seasons and setting the boundary stones of their dwelling.THE THREAD
And the messenger of the LORD found her by the eye of the waters in the wilderness, by that eye on the road to Shur.Ain is עַיִן (ʿayin), a word that can mean either “eye” or “spring”; Genesis uses it for a fountain. That shared word lets the city-name carry the image of a water source within this list of dwellings.
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