What Does Zechariah 8:5 Mean?
The broad streets of the city shall be filled with boys and girls laughing in them.
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 the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.THE KEY
The city’s streets are רחובות (rehovot), broad places; its wholeness is visible when children can fill that open space with play.
THE MEANING
The city is full of children playing openly in its streets. Joy occupies shared space, making the city’s life visible in ordinary, unguarded delight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Wholeness is more than surviving danger; it includes having room for delight to move freely in public.
THE ROOT
רְחֹבוֹת
rehovot
GROWS FROM
רחב
To be broad or spacious; to make room.
“broad streets” in this verse is rehovot. The word for streets grows from the root for widening: these are open places within the city. Children filling them with play makes spaciousness visible as lived freedom.
ALSO GROWS
rachav: Broad, wide
רָחָב
It makes the openness inside the word for streets audible.
merchav: A broad or open place
מֶרְחָב
It names the spaciousness that the children now occupy.
rechov: Street, square, or open place
רְחֹב
It is the singular form from which the verse’s רְחֹבוֹת (rehovot), streets, is formed.
מְשַׂחֲקִים
mesachaqim
GROWS FROM
שחק
To play or laugh; in some contexts, to make sport.
“laughing” in this verse is mesachaqim. The root holds play and laughter together, so the children’s movement carries delight as well as activity. The same root describes a creature at play in the waters, placing their street-play within a wider image of creation at ease.
ALSO GROWS
sechoq: Laughter
שְׂחוֹק
It reveals the delight carried within the act of playing.
mischaq: Play or game
מִשְׂחָק
It shows the same root naming play as an activity or game.
THE PATTERN
Wholeness becomes visible when life can move freely through shared spaces.
Thus says the LORD of hosts. Yet old men and old women shall settle in the broad streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his leaning staff in his hand, for the multitude of his days.There the ships go, and this leviathan you shape to laugh in it.But when Jesus saw it, he was vexed, and said to them, Let the little children come to me, and do not hold them back, for the governance of God belongs to such as these.THE THREAD
There the ships go, and this leviathan you shape to laugh in it.The word translated “play” here comes from שחק (ś-ḥ-q), meaning to play or laugh, the same root as the children playing in Zechariah. In the psalm, Leviathan plays in the waters, widening the scene from children at ease in the city to life at ease in creation.
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