What Does Numbers 32:14 Mean in the King James?
And, behold, ye are risen up in your fathers’ stead, an increase of sinful men, to augment yet the fierce anger of the LORD toward Israel.
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’s sharpest charge is that taking the fathers’ place turns inherited failure into an increase that adds to anger already burning against Israel.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks into the present wherever you take up a place shaped by earlier harm: what you continue can increase the breach and intensify its consequences for others. Its accusation remains severe, the repeated failure adds to the LORD’s fierce anger toward Israel.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that inheriting a place makes its old harm neutral: taking it up can extend the same breach and make its consequences greater.
THE ROOT
תַּרְבּוּת
tarbūt
GROWS FROM
רבה
To become many, increase, or multiply.
The word for “increase” grows from the root of becoming many, so the charge describes failure multiplying as one generation takes the place of another. The added harm enlarges what is already present.
ALSO GROWS
rāvâ: To grow in number or extent.
רָבָה
This is the verbal seed of תַּרְבּוּת, making the accusation about multiplication.
hirbâ: To cause something to grow or become numerous.
הִרְבָּה
This causative form echoes the verse’s movement: repeated conduct adds to what is already there.
חַטָּאִים
ḥaṭṭāʾîm
GROWS FROM
חטא
To miss, or to miss the mark.
The word for “sinful” comes from חטא, the language of missing the mark; its noun חֵטְא names the missing, while חַטָּאת also names an offering for the missing. Here, that root sits inside a charge of repetition: a missing pattern is carried forward and compounds the anger already named.
ALSO GROWS
ḥēṭʾ: A missing or failure.
חֵטְא
It gives the root’s concrete sense beneath the description of the men.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: An offering associated with the missing.
חַטָּאת
The branch keeps the language of missing present even where English can make “sin” sound like a detached label.
THE PATTERN
Repeated rupture can fill out an inherited measure and intensify its consequences.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound:THE THREAD
And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst:The same Hebrew root ספה (sāfâ, “add”) appears as לִסְפּוֹת (lispōt, “to add”) in both verses. Deuteronomy names someone claiming peace while adding drunkenness to thirst; here, repeated failure adds to the LORD’s burning anger.
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