What Does Ezekiel 45:9 Mean in the King James?
Thus saith the Lord GOD; Let it suffice you, O princes of Israel: remove violence and spoil, and execute judgment and justice, take away your exactions from my people, saith the Lord GOD.
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
Justice begins when power lifts its own violence and extraction off the people it governs.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks to power now: stop gaining through violence, judge fairly, and remove the burdens laid on the people. Justice becomes visible as relief from what authority has imposed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that authority can be just while it enriches itself through violence and leaves the cost with the people.
THE ROOT
צְדָקָה
tsedaqah
GROWS FROM
צדק
Rightness or alignment, being brought into line with what is due.
The root also appears in words for rightness and for a person who is aligned. Paired with judgment, justice here means more than issuing a verdict: it means bringing power into alignment, including by ending violence and extraction.
ALSO GROWS
tsedeq: rightness, justice, alignment
צֶדֶק
It names the standard the rulers are called to embody.
tsaddiq: one who is right or aligned
צַדִּיק
It shows that the same root describes both justice as an act and the character of one who acts justly.
הָרִימוּ
harimu
GROWS FROM
רום
To rise or be high; in this form, to lift up or away.
“take away” in this verse is harimu. The command pictures what the rulers impose as something to be lifted off the people. The verse makes relief concrete: their burden is not merely judged, but removed.
ALSO GROWS
rum: to rise or be high
רוּם
This basic upward motion sits beneath the command to lift something away.
marom: height, high place
מָרוֹם
This related word preserves the root’s image of height and makes the verse’s lifting language easier to see.
THE PATTERN
Justice is made visible when power stops imposing harm and the burdened receive relief.
But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.The Hebrew repeats tsedeq, from the same צדק root as the justice in this verse. Here, alignment is something to pursue for shared life; Ezekiel makes its measure plain by naming what must be lifted off the people.
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