What Does Joshua 9:23 Mean in the King James?

Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.

Joshua 9:23 · 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.

This verse in the Selah Decoded Version

THE KEY

The curse binds the Gibeonites to God’s house by making their labor the condition of not being cut off.

THE MEANING

This verse speaks now to the cost hidden inside belonging: a person may remain within a sacred order through work they did not choose. Here, the curse secures that place by binding the Gibeonites to hew wood and draw water for God’s house.

WHAT THIS UNDOES

A place within a sacred house does not automatically mean welcome or freedom; this verse names proximity maintained through coercion.

THE ROOT

יִכָּרֵת

yikkāret

GROWS FROM

כרת

kārat

Cut; sever; cut off.

“freed” in this verse is yikkāret. The Hebrew verb carries the image of being cut away or severed. Here, no one is cut away from slave service to God’s house; the word’s image makes their continued bondage sound like a grim form of remaining.

ALSO GROWS

kāret: Removal or severance from a people.

כָּרֵת

This branch shows what being cut off can mean: exclusion. Joshua’s sentence keeps the Gibeonites in place, but in bondage.

kārat berit: Enter a covenant, expressed as cutting a covenant.

כָּרַת בְּרִית

The same root can mark a binding relation as well as severance; here, continued attachment to the house takes the form of compelled labor.

THE PATTERN

Institutions reveal their power by who is compelled to serve them and whether their leaders accept the servant’s place.

And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour.

Exodus 1:14 · KJVThe line shows an order making its people’s survival depend on labor performed under rigour.

Their children that were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy, upon those did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice unto this day.

1 Kings 9:21 · KJVThe verse shows people who remain in the land made to sustain its order through bondservice.

For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth.

Luke 22:27 · KJVThe speaker stands in the servant’s place, putting the labor of service beside the status of the one who rules.

THE THREAD

And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.

Genesis 17:14 · KJV

The same root, ⁨כרת⁩ (kārat, cut or sever), appears in both verses. In Genesis it names exclusion from a people; here the Gibeonites are not cut away but remain bound to service, making the contrast between severance and coerced belonging visible.

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