What Does Proverbs 3:2 Mean?
For length of days, and years of life, and wholeness, they add to you.
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
For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.THE KEY
The verse joins long life with shalom, wholeness, as one kind of increase.
THE MEANING
The instruction held close adds days, years of life, and wholeness to your life. Its promise holds duration and well-being together: a longer life is also a life made whole.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Wisdom adds more than years alone; this verse joins length of life with wholeness.
THE ROOT
שָׁלוֹם
shalom
GROWS FROM
שלם
To be whole, complete, or intact.
The root family includes both wholeness and making good what is owed. So shalom here carries the sense of life held together, not only a calm feeling.
ALSO GROWS
shalem: Whole, complete.
שָׁלֵם
It makes clear that the added peace is also a kind of wholeness.
shillem: To repay, recompense, or make good.
שִׁלֵּם
This related verb carries the sense of setting something right, adding depth to the wholeness named by shalom.
אֹרֶךְ
orekh
GROWS FROM
ארך
To be long or to lengthen.
The word for length comes from a root that describes extension. The same root appears in the phrase for being slow to flare, linking long duration with a stretched-out response.
ALSO GROWS
arokh: Long.
אָרֹךְ
It shares the root’s sense of extension with the length of days in this verse.
erekh appayim: Slow to flare; literally, long of nostrils.
אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם
The same root for length describes anger that takes longer to rise.
יוֹסִיפוּ
yosifu
GROWS FROM
יסף
To add, increase, or continue.
“add” in this verse is yosifu. The verb pictures the benefits as an increase: days, years, and wholeness are added to you. The same root is carried in the name Yosef, meaning “he adds.”
ALSO GROWS
Yosef: He adds.
יוֹסֵף
The name carries the same root of increase found in the verse’s promise.
mosaf: Addition or supplement.
מוֹסָף
This related noun preserves the root’s sense of something added.
THE PATTERN
Wisdom’s way of life is pictured as joining length of days with well-being and wholeness.
You shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live, and so that it may go well with you, and so that you may lengthen your days in the land you shall take hold of.Turn aside from evil and do good; seek wholeness and pursue it.That it may go well with you, and you may be long in days upon the earth.THE THREAD
Turn aside from evil and do good; seek wholeness and pursue it.Both verses use שָׁלוֹם (shalom, wholeness). Proverbs names it as something added alongside long life; the Psalm shows it as wholeness to seek and pursue.
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