What Does 1 Chronicles 17:6 Mean in the King James?
Wheresoever I have walked with all Israel, spake I a word to any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people, saying, Why have ye not built me an house of cedars?
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The cedar house was never God’s charge for Israel’s judges; their charge was to tend the people among whom God already walked.
THE MEANING
God is already present among the people, moving with them; the leaders’ given work is to care for them. The verse asks whether God ever told them to build him a cedar house, and the question points back to the responsibility he did give them.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that God needs a grand structure before he can be near is undone here: he has already walked with his people, and he assigns their leaders the work of tending them.
THE ROOT
הִתְהַלַּכְתִּי
hithallakhti
GROWS FROM
הלך
to go, walk, move along
The verse pictures God as having walked with Israel, not as waiting inside a cedar building. This verb grows from the same root as ordinary walking and going, so divine nearness appears here as movement among the people.
ALSO GROWS
lalekhet: to go, to walk
לָלֶכֶת
It shares the root’s sense of movement, reinforcing that God’s presence is described as accompanying the people.
holekh: one who is going or walking
הוֹלֵךְ
This related form keeps the image of presence in motion rather than fixed in a building.
לִרְעוֹת
lir'ot
GROWS FROM
רעה
to shepherd, pasture, tend a flock
The charge to “feed” the people carries the wider work of shepherding: tending and guiding a flock as well as providing for it. The verse places that care at the center of the leaders’ assignment, while asking whether God ever charged them to build him a cedar house.
ALSO GROWS
ro'eh: shepherd, one who tends a flock
רֹעֶה
This is the person who carries out the same tending work named in the leaders’ charge.
mir'eh: pasture, grazing place
מִרְעֶה
The pasture is where the flock is fed, showing how provision belongs within the root’s larger picture of tending.
THE PATTERN
God’s presence moves among the people, while leadership takes shape through tending them with just and humble care.
For the LORD thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy: that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind;THE THREAD
So he fed them according to the integrity of his heart; and guided them by the skilfulness of his hands.The word “fed” here comes from רעה (ra’ah, to shepherd or tend), the same root as the charge “to feed” in 1 Chronicles. Psalm 78 makes the root’s wider sense visible: tending the people includes guiding them.
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