What Does Leviticus 25:45 Mean?
Moreover, from the children of those who settle beside you, who are sojourners among you, from them you shall buy, and from their families that are with you, which were born in your land, and they shall be your holding.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.THE KEY
Here, being born in the land does not protect a child from being included in the purchase of a family.
THE MEANING
This verse confronts you with a rule that turns resident families into property: people living among the community and children born on its land may be bought and held as a possession. It makes ownership reach across a family, naming human beings plainly as property.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that residence or birth in a place automatically protects a person from ownership is undone here.
THE ROOT
תִּקְנוּ
tiqnu from qanah
GROWS FROM
קנה
q-n-h
Acquire, buy, or obtain.
The verb qanah can describe acquiring or possessing; English “buy” foregrounds the transaction, while the root also carries the resulting claim. With families and children named as its objects, the verse extends acquisition across kinship.
ALSO GROWS
qoneh: Acquirer or possessor
קֹנֵה
This form appears in the phrase “possessor of heaven and earth,” showing the root’s range from acquiring to possessing.
miqneh: Livestock or acquired property
מִקְנֶה
The related word can name what is accumulated as property, sharpening the verse’s language of people being acquired.
אֲחֻזָּה
achuzzah
GROWS FROM
אחז
ʾ-ḥ-z
Grasp, seize, or hold.
The word for possession grows from a verb for grasping or holding. Its root keeps a physical image beneath the legal status: these families are placed in another’s hold.
ALSO GROWS
achaz: Grasp, seize, hold
אָחַז
This is the root verb behind the noun for possession, connecting ownership with the act of holding.
ne’echaz: Caught or held fast
נֶאֱחַז
In Genesis 22:13 a ram is caught in a thicket; the same root can describe being held fast, giving the verse’s possession language a constraining edge.
הַגָּרִים
haggārîm
GROWS FROM
גור
g-w-r
Dwell or reside as a sojourner.
“sojourn” in this verse is haggārîm. The families are named as gerim, people residing among you as sojourners. The wording places them within the community’s life before it names the right to buy them.
ALSO GROWS
ger: Resident alien or sojourner
גֵּר
This noun names the people whose residence among the community frames the verse.
megurekha: Your sojournings or places of residence as a sojourner
מְגוּרֶיךָ
The related form in Genesis 17:8 keeps dwelling as a sojourner at the center of the word family.
THE PATTERN
When people are treated as property, scripture can extend ownership across families and include coerced service.
If his master gives him a wife, and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children are her master's, and he goes out with only his body.But the women, the little ones, the cattle, and all that is in the city, all its plunder, you shall take for yourself; and you shall eat the plunder of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.Servants, place yourselves under your masters with all fear, not only to the good and the yielding, but also to the crooked.THE THREAD
Every male among you who is eight days old shall be cut, in your generations, the one born in your house or bought with silver from any foreigner who is not of your seed.The phrase “bought with money” uses a form from the same qanah root as “buy” in Leviticus. Genesis places those born into a household beside those purchased into it, opening the verse’s link between birth, family, and ownership.
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