What Does Judges 1:21 Mean?
And the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who settled in Jerusalem, but the Jebusites have settled with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.
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 the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.THE KEY
The Hebrew root for “drive out” also means “inherit,” so the failed expulsion leaves the inheritance incomplete.
THE MEANING
The verse holds an unfinished conquest in view: Benjamin’s presence does not erase the Jebusites, who still dwell beside them. Jerusalem (יְרוּשָׁלִַם, Yerushalayim, “two wholenesses”) sharpens the tension: the name carries wholeness while the city remains shared. It speaks now wherever claiming a space is mistaken for fully possessing it; what remains there makes the incompletion visible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that possession is complete once a claim is made falls away here: the Jebusites remain, so the transfer is visibly unfinished.
THE ROOT
הוֹרִישׁוּ
hôrîšû
GROWS FROM
ירש
y-r-sh
To possess or inherit; in the causative form, to dispossess or drive out.
The Hebrew phrase translated “drive out” uses the causative form of the root that also means “possess” or “inherit.” One root shows both sides of the transfer: dispossession for one people and possession for another. Here the transfer remains incomplete, and the Jebusites still dwell beside Benjamin.
ALSO GROWS
yārash: To take or receive possession, including as an inheritance.
יָרַשׁ
This is the same root in its basic form, revealing possession as the other side of the verse’s attempted dispossession.
môrāšāh: An inherited possession.
מֹרָשָׁה
This noun shows how the root can name the lasting possession received; in this verse, that possession remains unsettled.
THE PATTERN
What remains in a shared space continues to shape what happens there.
Manasseh did not drive out the settlers of Bethshean and its towns, nor of Taanach and its towns, nor of Dor and its towns, nor of Ibleam and its towns, nor of Megiddo and its towns, but the Canaanites were willing to settle in that land.But they interwove among the nations, and trained in their works.Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?THE THREAD
And he said to him, I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to take hold of it.Genesis uses the same root ירש (y-r-sh, possess or inherit) in “inherit it,” naming the receiving side of what Judges names as dispossession. The shared root reveals one transfer with two human sides.
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