What Does Joshua 21:22 Mean?
And Kibzaim with her pastures, and Bethhoron with her pastures; four cities.
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 Kibzaim with her suburbs, and Beth-horon with her suburbs; four cities.THE KEY
Kibzaim’s name is linked to the root for gathering, so the verse makes belonging concrete: the gathered have a place and room around it.
THE MEANING
This verse holds the towns and their surrounding open land together: four cities, each named and counted. Kibzaim echoes qavats (קָבַץ, qavats), meaning to gather or collect, so belonging takes shape as a place with room around it.
THE ROOT
קִבְצַיִם
Qibtsayim
GROWS FROM
קבץ
To gather or collect together.
Kibzaim is linked to qavats (קָבַץ, qavats), “to gather or collect”; the place-name is often glossed as “double heap.” The root makes gathering more than an inward feeling: here it echoes in named places and the open land around them.
ALSO GROWS
gathereth: One who gathers or collects.
מְקַבֵּץ
Isaiah 56:8 uses this form for the one who gathers Israel’s outcasts, bringing the root’s gathering sense into the open.
qibbetzam: Gathered them together.
קִבְּצָם
Psalm 107:3 uses this form for people gathered from distant lands, echoing how Kibzaim’s root carries the sense of bringing scattered ones together.
THE PATTERN
Gathering brings people into belonging with a place and room to dwell.
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.He gathers them in from the lands, from the east and the west, from the north and the south.And not for that nation only, but that he would also gather together into one the children of God who were scattered abroad.THE THREAD
The Lord GOD, who gathers the driven ones of Israel, says, Yet I will gather others to him, beside those already gathered to him.Kibzaim echoes qavats (קָבַץ, qavats), “to gather or collect”; Isaiah uses that same root for gathering the outcasts. The place-name’s echo opens this list of cities into a picture of gathering that gives the scattered a place.
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