What Does Acts 7:43 Mean in the King James?
Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.
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 verse turns its carriers into cargo: they carry a god they fashioned, then are carried away themselves.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks now: what you shape into a source of security can begin to shape your direction. Its final image reverses who carries whom, the people bearing their fashioned god are themselves carried away beyond Babylon.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that what you make can remain under your control: here, the makers and carriers end up carried themselves.
THE ROOT
σκηνή
skēnē
GROWS FROM
σκην-
skēn-
Tent, temporary shelter, or dwelling.
“tabernacle” in this verse is skēnē. The word names a portable dwelling, so the object is more than an image: it is a rival place of presence. The same word family describes pitching a tent or dwelling, while this verse ends with the worshipers themselves being carried away.
ALSO GROWS
skēnoō: To pitch a tent; to dwell.
σκηνόω
John uses this verb for the Word dwelling among people, making the shared image of a tent-root visible across the two passages.
skēnopoios: Tentmaker.
σκηνοποιός
Acts 18:3 uses this word for someone who makes tents, echoing the made and portable dwelling at the center of this verse.
THE PATTERN
What people fashion into an object of trust begins to shape the people who bow to it.
They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but themselves are gone into captivity.Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.THE THREAD
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.The verb translated “dwelt” comes from the same Greek tent-root as “tabernacle.” Here people set up a tent for what they have fashioned; John describes the Word dwelling among people, opening the verse’s image of a dwelling beyond a carried object.
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