What Does Joshua 15:51 Mean in the King James?

And Goshen, and Holon, and Giloh; eleven cities with their villages:

Joshua 15:51 · KJV

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 counts the surrounding villages as part of the place, not as details outside it.

THE MEANING

Belonging has a shape: the named cities and their surrounding settlements make up one recorded whole. The count includes the villages attached to those cities, too.

WHAT THIS UNDOES

A place is only its prominent center; the settlements around it do not count.

THE ROOT

וְחַצְרֵיהֶן

wəḥaṣrêhen

GROWS FROM

חצר

ḥ-ṣ-r

Enclosure or courtyard; by extension, a settlement or village.

The Hebrew word translated “villages” carries the sense of settlement and enclosure. The verse’s count therefore includes more than named urban centers: it also takes in the surrounding places where people dwell.

ALSO GROWS

ḥāṣēr: A courtyard or enclosed space.

חָצֵר

This sense gives the settlement word its concrete image of a bounded place of dwelling.

ḥăṣērîm: Settlements, often villages.

חֲצֵרִים

This plural form names the communities included alongside the cities in the verse.

THE PATTERN

A settled region is counted as a whole when both its cities and its surrounding villages are named.

And Lebaoth, and Shilhim, and Ain, and Rimmon: all the cities are twenty and nine, with their villages:

Joshua 15:32 · KJVThe inventory counts the villages together with the cities, just as this verse does.

And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.

Matthew 9:35 · KJVThe verse names cities and villages together as the inhabited places where people are encountered.

And he went through the cities and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem.

Luke 13:22 · KJVCities and villages again form a single account of the region’s settled places.

THE THREAD

But the houses of the villages which have no wall round about them shall be counted as the fields of the country: they may be redeemed, and they shall go out in the jubile.

Leviticus 25:31 · KJV

The Hebrew word translated “villages” in Joshua belongs to the same word family used here. Leviticus distinguishes these unwalled settlements from walled cities and counts their houses with the surrounding fields, showing how the word connects dwelling places to the land around them.

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