What Does Micah 5:12 Mean?
And I will cut off the mutterings from your hand, and there will be no more cloud-readers for you.
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
And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers: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.
In that day, says the LORD of hosts, I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, and they will no longer be remembered; and I will also cause the prophets and the unclean breath to cross over out of the land.Many of those who had practiced the meddling arts also brought their scrolls together and burned them before all people; and they counted the price, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.THE THREAD
On that day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram, saying, To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to 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.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us