What Does Joshua 23:13 Mean?
Know for certain that the LORD your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps for you, and lashes in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you.
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
Know for a certainty that the LORD your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from off this good land which the LORD your God hath given you.THE KEY
What remains among you becomes the snare that leads you out of what was given.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks in the language of brutal exposure: what remains becomes a snare, a trap, a scourge at your side, and a thorn in your eyes. The LORD’s gift of the good land does not erase the stated outcome: you can be lost from the very ground given to you.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The false belief is that what remains beside you is harmless or separate from your life; the verse says it can become the means of your loss.
THE ROOT
מוֹקֵשׁ
moqesh
GROWS FROM
יקש
yaqash
To lay a snare or ensnare.
“traps” in this verse is moqesh. English “trap” can sound like a static object; this Hebrew family also names the act of laying a snare and the one who sets it. What remains among you is pictured as an active catching force.
ALSO GROWS
moqesh: Snare, trap.
מוֹקֵשׁ
The verse names what the remaining nations become: something that catches.
yoqesh: Fowler, one who lays snares.
יוֹקֵשׁ
The word family connects the trap with the act of setting it, giving the danger an active edge.
אבד
abad
GROWS FROM
אבד
abad
To perish, be lost, or go missing.
“perish” in this verse is abad. The warning carries beyond pain and entrapment to the possibility of being lost from the good land. The same root holds both perishing and loss, so the endpoint is more than discomfort: it is removal from the ground you received.
ALSO GROWS
oved: Perishing; lost.
אָבֵד
This form carries the sense of being lost that shades the verse’s final warning.
avaddon: Destruction, ruin.
אֲבַדּוֹן
This branch extends the root’s movement from being lost toward destruction.
אֲדָמָה
adamah
GROWS FROM
אדם
ʾ-d-m
The word family of the ground-being and the ground, associated with red earth.
The destination is adamah, ground or soil, from the same word family as adam, the ground-being. “Perish from off this good land” touches the bond between the human and the ground carried in their names.
ALSO GROWS
adam: Human; Adam, the ground-being.
אָדָם
The human name belongs to the same family as the ground named in the verse.
adamah: Ground, soil.
אֲדָמָה
This is the word for the good land from which the verse says you may be lost.
THE PATTERN
What remains unremoved can become an entanglement that culminates in loss.
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.Therefore I also said, I will not drive them out from your faces. But they shall be thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.But those who want to be rich fall into testing and a snare, and into many mindless and harmful cravings, which sink people into ruin and the losing of the way.THE THREAD
Then the burning of the LORD's anger will flare against you, and he will shut the heavens, so that there is no rain, and the ground will not give its yield, and you will perish swiftly from upon the good ground which the LORD gives you.Both verses use the Hebrew root אבד (abad), meaning to perish or be lost. Deuteronomy places that loss beside the same “good land” given by the LORD, opening Joshua’s warning as a movement from entanglement toward being lost from the ground itself.
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