What Does Exodus 34:17 Mean in the King James?
Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
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
A cast god bears the limits of its mold, exposing the contradiction of making the source something ownable.
THE MEANING
This verse meets the impulse to give the divine a form that can be made, held, and possessed. The cast image carries the shape supplied by its maker; it cannot contain the living source it claims to represent. The command exposes the constriction in treating a made thing as that source.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse dissolves the belief that an object made for oneself can contain or control the divine. Whatever takes its form from human hands carries the limits of that form.
THE ROOT
מַסֵּכָה
massekhah
GROWS FROM
נ־ס־ך
To pour out or cast, especially metal.
The Hebrew word for a molten image grows from the act of pouring or casting: the object is named by how it is made. The same root also names a poured-out offering, linking a shaped image and something poured out while showing the human act behind both.
ALSO GROWS
nasakh: To pour out; to cast.
נָסַךְ
This is the root’s action: the image begins as material poured into a form.
nesekh: A poured-out offering or libation.
נֶסֶךְ
The shared root keeps the act of pouring visible, even as the poured material becomes either an offering or a cast image.
THE PATTERN
An image made to hold the divine displays the maker’s limits rather than the source’s life.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.THE THREAD
Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing?Isaiah 44:10 uses the same Hebrew root for the cast image and asks whether the result can profit anyone. The shared root reveals the act behind the object: what is poured and shaped by human hands carries the limits of its making.
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