What Does Numbers 33:52 Mean?
Then you shall drive out all those who settle the land from your face, and you shall make perish all their figured stones, and make perish all their poured images, and wipe out all their high places.
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
Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:THE KEY
The verb translated “drive out” is also used for “inherit,” binding dispossession and possession together in the verse.
THE MEANING
The verse gives you an uncompromising command: drive out every inhabitant, destroy every picture and molten image, and pull down every high place. Its repeated “all” leaves no remainder within its stated scope. The verb for driving out also belongs to the word family for taking possession, binding expulsion to inheritance.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a new possession can coexist with every prior claim and worship marker: here, possession is inseparable from their removal.
THE ROOT
וְהוֹרַשְׁתֶּם
vehorashtem
GROWS FROM
ירש
To take possession or inherit; in the causative stem, to dispossess.
The Hebrew verb translated “drive out” is the causative form of ירשׁ, a root also used for inheriting or possessing. The verse binds expulsion to acquisition: the land becomes inheritance through dispossession.
ALSO GROWS
ureshu: Possess, take possession
וּרְשׁוּ
Deuteronomy 1:8 uses this form from the same root for entering and possessing the land, revealing the root’s other direction.
morashah: Inheritance, possession
מוֹרָשָׁה
This noun from the same root names what possession becomes: an inheritance.
THE PATTERN
The text depicts a claim on sacred space as complete only when its rival occupants and visible forms of worship are removed.
But thus shall you do to them. You shall tear down their altars, shatter their standing stones, cut down their upright poles, and burn their hewn images in the fire.Know for certain that the LORD your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps for you, and lashes in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you.And when he had made a whip of cords, he threw them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen. He poured out the coins of the coin-breakers and turned over their tables.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.Numbers uses the causative form of י־ר־שׁ (y-r-sh), “to dispossess”; Deuteronomy uses וּרְשׁוּ (ureshu), “possess,” from the same root. The root carries both sides of the movement: removing a present claim and entering into inheritance.
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