What Does Proverbs 22:28 Mean in the King James?
Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.
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 landmark is a boundary carrying an inheritance forward, not merely a stone marking a patch of ground.
THE MEANING
A small boundary can hold a real portion of someone’s inheritance. This verse speaks now wherever what one generation set still determines whose ground is whose.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the claim that what came before me is mine to redraw at will.
THE ROOT
גְּבוּל
gĕvûl
GROWS FROM
גבל
g-b-l
To mark off or set a boundary.
The landmark is the boundary itself: a line that determines where one person’s portion ends and another’s begins. The Hebrew keeps the boundary and the ground it defines in one word-family, showing why shifting the marker changes more than the shape of a field.
ALSO GROWS
higbîl: Set bounds or mark off.
הִגְבִּיל
This verb shows the boundary as an act of defining an extent, not just a stone left in the ground.
gĕvûlāh: Territory or border.
גְּבוּלָה
The border gives shape to the territory whose extent and possession the landmark protects.
תַּסֵּג
tassēg
GROWS FROM
נסג
n-s-g
To withdraw, recede, or move back.
“remove” in this verse is tassēg. The verb carries the sense of shifting a boundary back. That makes the act concrete: the marker moves, and so does the line of another person’s portion.
ALSO GROWS
nāsōg: To withdraw or recede.
נָסוֹג
This form makes the movement inherent in the root visible: what is removed is made to retreat from its place.
hēsīg: To move back or displace.
הֵסִיג
This causative form highlights an agent shifting something from its established position, as the verse describes.
עָשׂוּ
ʿāśû
GROWS FROM
עשה
ʿ-ś-h
To do or make.
“set” in this verse is ʿāśû. The verse says the fathers ‘made’ the boundary. It is a deliberate act carried across generations, not a line that appears by itself.
ALSO GROWS
maʿăśeh: A deed, work, or act.
מַעֲשֶׂה
This noun from the same root frames the boundary as something made through an act.
ʿōśeh: One who does or makes.
עֹשֶׂה
This form brings the makers into view: the boundary bears the mark of those who established it.
THE PATTERN
A boundary held in trust protects a portion that reaches beyond the person standing at it.
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;THE THREAD
Remove not the old landmark; and enter not into the fields of the fatherless:The same Hebrew warning about shifting a boundary returns here, joined directly to the fatherless person’s field. That link shows whose portion can be swallowed when a marker is moved.
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