What Does Numbers 14:13 Mean?
And Moses said to the LORD, Then the Egyptians will hear it, for you brought up this people by your strength from its midst.
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 Moses said unto the LORD, Then the Egyptians shall hear it, (for thou broughtest up this people in thy might from among them;)THE KEY
The release cannot stay private: the place the people leave becomes the first audience for their ascent.
THE MEANING
When you are brought up from a constricting place, the release reaches beyond you: others can hear what carried you out. Moses sees that the Egyptians may hear the story of a people raised from among them by a might greater than their own. The departure changes what can be said about the power that once defined the boundary.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that deliverance is only private relief; the verse shows it can also become a witness others hear.
THE ROOT
הֶעֱלִיתָ
heʿelita
GROWS FROM
עלה
ʿ-l-h
To go up or ascend; in the causative form here, to bring up or cause to ascend.
The verb presents the people’s departure as an ascent: they are brought up from among Egypt. English “broughtest up” carries this upward movement, not only a change of location.
ALSO GROWS
ʿalah: To go up, ascend.
עָלָה
This is the basic motion inside the verb: the people are made to rise out of the place they occupied.
ʿolah: An offering that ascends, traditionally rendered “burnt offering.”
עֹלָה
This branch preserves the root’s upward movement and makes the ascent in “broughtest up” easier to hear.
וְשָׁמְעוּ
ve-shamʿu
GROWS FROM
שמע
sh-m-ʿ
To hear, listen, or heed.
“hear” in this verse is ve-shamʿu. The root can hold hearing and attending together, while this clause focuses on the news reaching Egypt. The release becomes an account that can be received, considered, and repeated.
ALSO GROWS
shemaʿ: Hear; listen and respond.
שְׁמַע
It shows the fuller range of the hearing-root, though the verse here specifically says the Egyptians will hear the report.
shemuʿah: A report or news heard.
שְׁמוּעָה
This branch brings out the public life of the event: what happens to the people becomes news beyond them.
מֹשֶׁה
Mosheh
GROWS FROM
משׁה
m-sh-h
To draw out; the name carries the biblical wordplay of being drawn out.
Moses speaks here as one whose name is linked with being drawn out. His name and the people’s ascent meet in a shared image of life brought out from what held it.
ALSO GROWS
māshāh: To draw out.
מָשָׁה
This verb supplies the name’s biblical wordplay and echoes the movement of being brought out.
Mosheh: Moses; the name linked with “drawn out.”
מֹשֶׁה
The speaker’s name carries the motion of extraction as he describes a people brought up from among Egypt.
THE PATTERN
A release becomes a public witness as its story travels beyond the people who experience it.
Why should the Egyptians speak and say, For harm did he bring them out, to have them struck down in the mountains and to finish them from the face of the ground? Turn back from the burning of your anger, and relent from this harm against your people.For we have heard how the LORD dried up the waters of the Red Sea before your face, when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites, Sihon and Og, who were across the Jordan, whom you devoted to destruction.The LORD has bared his set-apart arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the edges of the earth shall see the deliverance of our God.THE THREAD
And I have come down to snatch them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land into a good and wide land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.The same root עלה (ʿ-l-h), meaning “ascend” or “bring up,” appears in both verses. Exodus 3:8 names the destination of the ascent; Numbers 14:13 shows that the people’s rising from Egypt will also be heard by those they leave behind.
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