What Does Numbers 21:32 Mean?
And Moses sent to spy out Jaazer, and they seized its villages and drove out the Amorites who were there.
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 sent to spy out Jaazer, and they took the villages thereof, and drove out the Amorites that were there.THE KEY
The Hebrew verb for driving out is also a verb for possessing or inheriting land: one people’s gain is another people’s dispossession.
THE MEANING
A search for a way into a place becomes the taking of its settlements and the expulsion of its inhabitants. You see possession whole here: the land one people gain is the land another people lose.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that an inheritance is only a gift: here, possession comes through removing those already living there.
THE ROOT
וַיּוֹרֶשׁ
wayyōreš
GROWS FROM
י־ר־שׁ
y-r-sh
To possess or inherit; in a causative form, to dispossess.
The verb rendered “drove out” belongs to the same root used for possessing and inheriting land. Hebrew holds both sides in one root: the place enters one people’s possession as its occupants are dispossessed.
ALSO GROWS
yārash: Possess, inherit; in a causative form, dispossess.
יָרַשׁ
This root’s different forms show how taking a place as one’s own can also mean driving out its prior occupants.
môrāshāh: Inheritance, possession.
מוֹרָשָׁה
This noun names an inherited holding, showing that inheritance in this root can mean occupying a place, not only receiving a promise.
THE PATTERN
Biblical inheritance is concrete possession of land, and some passages name its gain alongside the expulsion of those already living there.
See, I have set the land before you. Go in and take hold of the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them and to their seed after them.You, with your hand, drove out the nations and planted them; you broke the peoples and sent them away.Flourishing are the bowed, for they inherit the earth.THE THREAD
See, I have set the land before you. Go in and take hold of the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them and to their seed after them.The verb rendered “drove out” here is from י־ר־שׁ (y-r-sh), the root used for “possess” in Deuteronomy. Together, the verses make the transfer plain: Israel’s entry into possession is the Amorites’ removal.
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