What Does Isaiah 50:1 Mean in the King James?
Thus saith the LORD, Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.
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 repeated Hebrew root for “sell” turns attention from an imagined buyer to the crookedness under which the reader is sold.
THE MEANING
The verse asks the reader to identify a divorce document or creditor behind the rupture, then names crookedness and rebellion as its cause. The sale and separation are tied to the reader’s own actions, not to an outside creditor’s claim.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that God has handed you over because someone else holds a debt claim on you; the verse dismisses the creditor and names your crookedness as the cause.
THE ROOT
נִמְכַּרְתֶּם
nimkartem
GROWS FROM
מכר
To sell or transfer into another’s possession.
The question first uses מָכַרְתִּי (“I sold you”), then shifts to נִמְכַּרְתֶּם (“you were sold”), rendered in the KJV as “sold yourselves.” The repeated מכר root keeps the sale in view while the question denies that an outside creditor owns a claim over you.
ALSO GROWS
makhartî: I sold.
מָכַרְתִּי
This is the same root in the verse’s question about whom the LORD supposedly sold the people to.
mimkar: A sale or something sold.
מִמְכָּר
This noun from the same root makes the transaction itself visible in the verse’s repeated sale language.
כְּרִיתוּת
keritut
GROWS FROM
כרת
To cut or cut off.
The word for “divorcement” grows from כרת, the root of cutting off. That same root forms the phrase “cut a covenant,” so the image carries both severance and the language of a bond being made.
ALSO GROWS
karat: To cut or cut off.
כָּרַת
This is the root verb inside כְּרִיתוּת, expressing divorce as severance.
karat berit: To cut a covenant; to establish a covenant.
כָּרַת בְּרִית
The same cutting root can mark a binding bond, revealing the relational force inside the word for divorce.
THE PATTERN
Rupture and bondage are traced to the direction of human action, not to an outside creditor’s claim.
Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God, when he led thee by the way?But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?THE THREAD
When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.Deuteronomy names the document Isaiah asks about with the phrase ספר כריתות, “a writing of cutting off,” from כרת. Isaiah uses that severance image while locating the rupture in crookedness and rebellion.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us