What Does Psalm 105:44 Mean?
And he gave them the lands of nations, and they took hold of the toil of the peoples.
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 gave them the lands of the heathen: and they inherited the labour of the people;THE KEY
The word “inherit” carries both possession and dispossession, and what passes into the inheritors’ hands is the peoples’ own labor.
THE MEANING
The verse names inheritance as a material transfer: lands belonging to nations are given, and their toil passes into another people’s possession. What is received as a gift by the inheritors is also a loss of land and work for those who labored there.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that inheritance is automatically costless: here, the verse names other peoples’ land and labor as what the heirs receive.
THE ROOT
יִירָשׁוּ
yirashu
GROWS FROM
ירשׁ
y-r-sh
To possess, take possession of, or inherit; in the causative stem, to dispossess or drive out.
“took hold of” in this verse is yirashu. The verb rendered “inherited” belongs to a root that can also describe dispossessing others. The same root holds the receiving and the removal together, and here what changes hands includes the peoples’ own labor.
ALSO GROWS
yerushah: Inheritance, possession, or property received.
יְרוּשָּׁה
This branch shows inheritance as possession itself, which sharpens the verse’s account of what the new owners receive.
horish: To dispossess, drive out, or give possession to another.
הוֹרִישׁ
This causative branch makes visible the displacement that can accompany the act of possessing.
עֲמַל
ʿamal
GROWS FROM
עמל
ʿ-m-l
Toil, exertion, or wearisome labor.
This word names exertion, not an abstract store of wealth. The verse makes the work itself, the toil expended by peoples, part of what passes to the inheritors.
ALSO GROWS
ʿāmāl: Toil, trouble, or labor.
עָמָל
As a noun, it names the exertion the verse identifies as part of the inheritance.
ʿāmal: To labor or toil.
עָמַל
The verb brings the labor back to the people who expend themselves in the work.
THE PATTERN
Inheritance can transfer land and the fruits of labor from those who worked them to those who receive them.
And the LORD gave the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, so that they lent them what they asked. And they stripped the Egyptians.And I have given you a land you did not toil for, and cities you did not build, and you settle in them. From vineyards and olive groves you did not plant, you eat.I sent you to reap what you did not toil for. Others toiled, and you have entered into their toil.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.“Possess” here comes from the same root as “inherited” in Psalm 105:44. That root can name receiving land and, in its causative form, dispossessing others; the psalm makes the transfer sharper by naming the peoples’ labor alongside the land.
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