What Does Joshua 21:24 Mean?
Aijalon with her pastures, Gathrimmon 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
Aijalon with her suburbs, Gath-rimmon with her suburbs; four cities.THE KEY
Even these city names hold a landscape, איילון (Ayyalon, “deer place”) and גַּת־רִמּוֹן (Gath-rimmon, “pomegranate winepress”), and each is counted with open ground around it.
THE MEANING
Aijalon and Gath-rimmon are named alongside their surrounding open ground, closing a four-city allotment. The place is held as more than a built center: room around the dwelling belongs to its provision.
THE ROOT
מִגְרָשׁ
migrash
GROWS FROM
גרש
garash
Drive out, expel; the related noun names open land around a city.
“pastures” in this verse is migrash. The same consonants hold the force of expelling and a word for open ground beside a town. Here that surrounding space is counted with the settlement, not left as an unnamed edge.
ALSO GROWS
garash: Drive out, expel.
גָּרַשׁ
This verb carries the root’s force and makes the open space around the city part of the word’s wider field of meaning.
migrash: Open land or pasture around a city.
מִגְרָשׁ
This is the word behind “suburbs”: the allotment includes usable ground around each settlement.
THE PATTERN
An inhabited center is named together with the space that sustains life around it.
The cities shall be theirs to settle in, and the pasturelands shall be for their cattle, for their goods, and for all their beasts.The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a shelter for the hyraxes.Which is indeed the smallest of all seeds; but when it has grown, it is the greatest of the garden plants, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.THE THREAD
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 same Hebrew word, מִגְרָשׁ (migrash), names the open land around the towns. Numbers makes clear that this surrounding space belongs to the allotment, so the cities here are counted with the ground around them.
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