What Does Numbers 26:42 Mean?
These are the sons of Dan after their families. Of Shuham, the family of the Shuhamites. These are the families of Dan after their families.
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
These are the sons of Dan after their families: of Shuham, the family of the Shuhamites. These are the families of Dan after their families.THE KEY
Dan’s name carries the meaning “judge” into the family line, so the census preserves a name’s meaning alongside the names of its descendants.
THE MEANING
Your place in a larger whole does not erase the particular line by which you are known. The verse names Dan, then a family within Dan, then gathers that family back into the wider clan: belonging stays both specific and shared.
THE ROOT
דָּן
dān
GROWS FROM
דין
To judge; judgment.
The name Dan is linked to the Hebrew root for judging, a meaning made explicit in the naming story of his birth. Here the name continues through a family line, carrying its meaning as the clan is counted.
ALSO GROWS
din: judgment
דִּין
The root’s basic sense beneath Dan’s name.
yādîn: he shall judge
יָדִין
The same root appears as an action in Genesis 49:16, where Dan is named as the one who will judge his people.
THE PATTERN
A larger people is made visible through distinct members whose belonging remains named.
God settles the lone ones into households; he brings out the bound ones in chains; but the ones who turn away dwell in a parched land.For as the body is one, and has many limbs, and all the limbs of the body, though many, are one body, so also is the Anointed One.THE THREAD
Dan, the judge, shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel.Here the name Dan becomes an action: “shall judge” comes from the same Hebrew root carried in his name. Numbers 26:42 follows that name into a family line, letting the root’s meaning remain attached to the clan.
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