What Does Judges 21:3 Mean?
And they said, O LORD God of Israel, why has this come to be in Israel, that today one tribe should be missing from the count in Israel?
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 said, O LORD God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to day one tribe lacking in Israel?THE KEY
The word translated “lacking” comes from a root of attending and counting, so one tribe’s absence becomes something the whole people must reckon with.
THE MEANING
The question makes communal absence impossible to hide: one tribe is missing, and Israel feels that loss as a fracture in the whole. The question brings that fracture directly before the LORD, leaving the reason open. The missing tribe remains part of the people even in its absence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that a people can still call itself whole while an entire tribe is missing.
THE ROOT
לְהִפָּקֵד
lehippaqed
GROWS FROM
פקד
p-q-d
To attend to or take account of; also to muster or count.
“missing from the count” in this verse is lehippaqed. The Hebrew word for “lacking” comes from פקד, a root that also means to attend to, muster, or take account. The missing tribe is the part of the people that cannot be found in the count, making absence visible as a fracture in the whole.
ALSO GROWS
paqad: To attend to, visit, muster, or count.
פָּקַד
The root’s sense of taking account makes the absent tribe something the people must reckon with.
nifqad: To be missing or absent.
נִפְקַד
This form names the condition of the tribe in the verse: it is not present in Israel’s reckoning.
pequddah: Oversight, charge, or appointment.
פְּקֻדָּה
This branch also carries the sense of being placed under someone’s attention or account.
THE PATTERN
The loss of even one part is a wound the whole cannot dismiss.
And Jacob their father said to them, You have made me childless. Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and you will take Benjamin away. All these things are upon me.What man among you, holding a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness and go after the one that has lost its way until he finds it?If one limb aches, all the limbs ache with it, and if one is clothed in weight, all of them rejoice with it.THE THREAD
And they said to Moses, Your servants have lifted up the heads of the men of war who are under our charge, and not one man of us is lacking.Judges calls the tribe “lacking” with nifqad, from פקד; Numbers says “there lacketh not one man” with the same root. In one verse a tribe is missing; in the other, the count confirms that no one is missing.
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