What Does Micah 5:12 Mean in the King James?
And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers:
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 cut reaches both what your hand practices and the voices that claim to read what is hidden.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks of a life where these practices are no longer in your hand and the voices claiming hidden knowledge no longer direct you. Wholeness appears here by subtraction: the grip and its guides are removed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that hidden uncertainty requires a diviner to manage it: here, the promised change is that the diviner no longer has a place.
THE ROOT
וְהִכְרַתִּי
ve-hikhratti
GROWS FROM
כרת
To cut, sever, or cut down.
English separates “cut off” from the biblical phrase “cut a covenant,” but Hebrew carries both through כרת (karat). The same decisive cutting can sever what occupies the hand or establish a binding relation; here, the object is sorcery, so the root makes restoration a removal at its source.
ALSO GROWS
kārat: To cut or sever.
כָּרַת
The promised removal is a decisive severing, not a gradual fading.
kārat berit: Literally, to cut a covenant; idiomatically, to make a covenant.
כָּרַת בְּרִית
This familiar covenant phrase uses the same root, showing how English can hide the Hebrew image of a decisive cut.
THE PATTERN
Restoration clears false sources of hidden guidance by removing both their practices and the instruments that sustain them.
And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.THE THREAD
In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:The Hebrew uses כרת (karat) in both places, though the KJV renders the phrase here as “made a covenant.” The same root that cuts sorcery away also names the cutting of a covenant.
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