What Does Judges 1:4 Mean?
And Judah went up, and the LORD gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand, and they struck down ten thousand men of them in Bezek.
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 Judah went up; and the LORD delivered the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand: and they slew of them in Bezek ten thousand men.THE KEY
The word translated “delivered” also means “shut in,” so the verse presents the handover as an enclosure into Judah’s power.
THE MEANING
Here, power changes hands and violence follows: the LORD delivers the Canaanites and Perizzites into Judah’s hand, and Judah kills ten thousand men at Bezek. The verse holds divine transfer and human killing together without disguising either action.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that divine handover always means rescue for everyone involved dissolves here: the delivered people are killed.
THE ROOT
וַיַּסְגֵּר
wayyasger
GROWS FROM
סגר
s-g-r
To shut or close; in the causative stem, to hand over or surrender.
“gave” in this verse is wayyasger. The same root carries both the concrete act of shutting and the sense of handing someone over. English makes “delivered” sound like a completed transfer; Hebrew also leaves the image of someone closed into another’s control, sharpening the violence that follows.
ALSO GROWS
sāgar: To shut, close.
סָגַר
In Genesis 7:16, the LORD “shut him in” with this root; that concrete image remains beneath the handover in this verse.
hisgīr: To hand over, surrender.
הִסְגִּיר
Deuteronomy 23:15 uses this form when forbidding the handover of an escaped servant, showing the same root at work in a different human situation.
THE PATTERN
The Hebrew root סגר can describe both shutting someone in and handing them over, framing a transfer as entry into another’s control.
And those who came in, male and female of all flesh, came as God had commanded him, and the LORD shut him in.You shall not hand over to his master the servant who has escaped from his master to you.Will the men of Keilah shut me up into his hand? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? O LORD God of Israel, I beg you, tell your servant. And the LORD said, He will come down.THE THREAD
You shall not hand over to his master the servant who has escaped from his master to you.The same root that describes these peoples being handed into Judah’s power is used here for an escaped servant whom Israel is told not to hand back. The shared verb makes the force of “delivered” audible while the verses place handover in sharply different human situations.
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