What Does Judges 18:9 Mean in the King James?
And they said, Arise, that we may go up against them: for we have seen the land, and, behold, it is very good: and are ye still? be not slothful to go, and to enter to possess the land.
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 verb translated “possess” holds both sides of the conquest: to take the land is also to dispossess those already there.
THE MEANING
The speakers call the land “very good,” then turn that judgment into urgency to go against its inhabitants and take it. The Hebrew verb for “possess” can also mean “dispossess,” so the gain they name carries the expulsion they leave unstated. The violence stays in the sentence even while the land, rather than its people, receives all the praise.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that a land’s being good makes taking it harmless; the word for possessing it also carries the action of dispossessing its people.
THE ROOT
לָרֶשֶׁת
lārešet
GROWS FROM
יָרַשׁ
Take possession or inherit; in its causative form, dispossess or drive out.
English “possess” can sound like simply acquiring a thing, but this root also names driving out those who possess it already. The verse’s command to possess the land therefore carries the displacement inside the same root.
ALSO GROWS
môrāšāh: Inheritance, possession
מוֹרָשָׁה
This noun shows possession as something received or held; the verse’s call to take the land makes that inheritance a contested one.
hôrîš: Dispossess, drive out
הוֹרִישׁ
This causative form makes the other side of possession explicit: one group’s taking can mean another group’s expulsion.
טוֹבָה
ṭōvāh
GROWS FROM
טוֹב
Be good, pleasant, or beneficial.
The word names what attracts the speakers, but it does not itself make their means just. Genesis 3:6 uses this same root for what appears “good” before it is taken, joining the judgment of desirability to the act of grasping.
ALSO GROWS
ṭôv: Good, pleasant, beneficial
טוֹב
This is the word applied to the land; its stated goodness is the speakers’ appraisal of what they want to take.
ṭûv: Goodness, prosperity, good things
טוּב
The same root can name the good things a place yields; here the appraisal points to the land’s desirability, not the justice of seizing it.
THE PATTERN
When desire names a thing good, the act of taking it can conceal who loses it.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them, and took them; and, behold, they are hid in the earth in the midst of my tent, and the silver under it.Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.THE THREAD
Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee.Deuteronomy uses the same Hebrew verb, “to possess,” in a warning against making possession proof of personal righteousness; it also names the people being driven out. That pairing makes explicit what Judges 18:9 compresses into its verb: one group’s gain is another’s dispossession.
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