What Does Judges 15:15 Mean?
And he found a fresh jawbone of an ass, and stretched out his hand, and took it, and struck down a thousand men with it.
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 he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.THE KEY
The Hebrew word beneath “slew” names the strike itself, holding the thousand deaths close to the jawbone and the hand that wields it.
THE MEANING
The verse confronts you with a brutal chain: an object is found, a hand reaches out and takes it, and a thousand men are struck dead with it. The violence remains literal; the jawbone is the instrument of mass killing. The Hebrew verb translated “slew” carries the concrete sense “struck,” keeping the bodily blow inside the reported deaths.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that lethal force must come from a purpose-built weapon is undone here: a donkey’s jawbone becomes the instrument of a thousand deaths.
THE ROOT
וַיַּךְ
wayyak
GROWS FROM
נכה
nakah
to strike, smite
“struck down” in this verse is wayyak. The English “slew” gives the outcome, while the Hebrew verb names the physical strike. A word from this same root can name both a blow and a striker, keeping the action and its damage within one family.
ALSO GROWS
makkah: blow, wound, or plague
מַכָּה
The same root names the impact and its injury, making the physical force behind the deaths visible.
makkeh: one who strikes
מַכֶּה
This form keeps the striker within the same word family as the blow, echoing the hand’s role in the scene.
וַיִּשְׁלַח
wayyishlach
GROWS FROM
שלח
shalach
to send forth, release, or stretch out
“stretched out his hand” in this verse is wayyishlach. The hand is not merely raised; the verb is shalach, the root of sending forth and releasing. Here that outward movement reaches for a weapon, showing the root’s action without deciding in advance what the sending will bring.
ALSO GROWS
shilluach: sending away or release
שִׁלּוּחַ
This branch preserves the root’s sense of sending and releasing, making the reach of the hand part of the verse’s central action.
Shiloach: sent forth; Siloam, the sent waters
שִׁילֹחַ
The same root names the sent waters of Shiloam; here it describes a hand sent outward toward an instrument of violence.
THE PATTERN
What is at hand can become the instrument of an outcome far beyond its apparent scale.
And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, who struck down six hundred of the Philistines with an ox goad. He also delivered Israel.So David gripped the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and spoke good over them, and broke the loaves and gave them to his disciples to set before them, and the two fish he divided among them all.THE THREAD
So David gripped the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.The Hebrew verb translated “slew” here and “smote” in Samuel comes from the same root, נכה (nakah), “to strike.” Both scenes place an unexpected object in a hand and make the strike the hinge of the action.
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