What Does Nehemiah 7:14 Mean?
The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and sixty.
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
The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and threescore.THE KEY
The number does not swallow the name: Zaccai’s family is held as a people whose name carries the sense of clearness or being cleared.
THE MEANING
This verse holds together two things that often pull apart: a family is many, and it is still named. Zaccai carries the sense of clearness or being cleared, while its count gives it a distinct place in the whole. You can belong to a larger body without becoming invisible inside it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being one among many makes you invisible: here a people is both named and counted.
THE ROOT
זַכַּי
Zakkay
GROWS FROM
ז־כ־ה
To be clear or pure; to be cleared or found innocent.
Zaccai carries the root’s language of clearness and being cleared. Beside the exact count, the name gives this line more than a tally: it holds a people’s identity together with their place in the whole.
ALSO GROWS
zakh: Pure, clean, clear.
זַךְ
This related word makes the name’s shade of clearness audible in the family’s name.
zakhah: To be clean or innocent; to be cleared.
זָכָה
The root’s sense of being cleared travels with the name, even as the verse records this family as part of a larger count.
THE PATTERN
Being counted among many does not erase a name.
He counts the number of the stars; he calls each of them by name.Behold, I have carved you upon the palms of my hands; your walls are always before me.But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not shrink, for you surpass many sparrows.THE THREAD
The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and sixty.Ezra gives the same family name with the same count, keeping Zaccai attached to a particular people wherever this line appears. The name’s root, זכה (zakhah, to be pure or cleared), carries its shade of clearness alongside that family’s place in the count.
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