Nehemiah 10:20 — Word Study

Context — The Covenant of Nehemiahgenerated

Cross References

The Key Word — מַגְפִּיעָשׁ, mag.pi.'Ashgenerated

How Translations Differ — measured against the Berean Standard Biblegenerated

Sentence Structuregenerated

Septuagint Backgroundgenerated

In plain words — the whole versegenerated

Frequently Asked Questionsgenerated

Reflection Questionsgenerated

1. What can we learn from the leaders who signed the covenant with Nehemiah about commitment to God?
2. How does understanding the meanings of these names enhance our reading of this passage?
3. In what ways can we apply the principles of covenant commitment in our own lives?
4. Why is it important to remember the names of those who contributed to the restoration of Israel?

Commentators on this verse — 2 expositors, verse by verse

Each of these wrote on Nehemiah 10:20 itself, not merely on the chapter around it.

Robert Jamieson1802–1880Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown's Commentary

Seraiah, Azariah, Jeremiah, No JFB commentary on these verses.

Read Robert Jamieson on Nehemiah 10 →

CambridgeThe Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

3–8, Priests: 9–13, Levites: 14–28, Chiefs of the peopleThe 21 names here given are those of the priestly houses. The list of Neh 12:1-3 agrees with it in 16 names. The number 21 is peculiar; in chap. 12 the number is larger by one. In Ezra 2, Nehemiah 7, only four priestly houses are recorded, viz. Jedaiah, Immer, Pashur and Harim, as having returned with Zerubbabel. Pashur is mentioned in Nehemiah 10:3; Harim in Nehemiah 10:5. The other priestly families had either developed themselves out of these first four, or had arrived from time to time from Babylon. That 21 and not 24 are recorded, is noteworthy. Various conjectures have been hazarded, e.g. that names have dropped out from the…

Read Cambridge on Nehemiah 10 →

The verse in English, compared — 17 translations, and where they part company

Every translation on this page is a decision someone had to make and commit to. Read down a column and you see one translator's judgement; read across a row and you see the range the Greek actually allows. The BSB is the wording the rest of this page is measured against, so it is listed first.

Counted from the translations carried on this site, not from a survey of every English Bible. A rendering shared by many versions is usually inherited rather than independently arrived at — the Tyndale line in particular runs through most of them.

The sentence as the grammar sees it — from the MACULA Hebrew treebank

This is not our own analysis: it is the scholarly syntax tree for the verse, showing how the clause actually holds together.

Boxes are the grammarian's groupings — clause, noun phrase, prepositional phrase.

The four witnesses to this verse — Masoretic, Septuagint, Samaritan, Qumran

The Masoretic Text of Nehemiah 10:20 lists the names "Magpiash, Meshullam, Hezir" in Hebrew as מַגְפִּיעָ֥שׁ מְשֻׁלָּ֖ם חֵזִֽיר׃. The Septuagint agrees with the Masoretic Text, as all three names are matched in its word-by-word correspondence, although the word order and articles differ due to the nature of the Greek translation. There are no significant differences noted in the Samaritan Pentateuch or the Dead Sea Scrolls for this verse, indicating a strong consistency across these ancient witnesses.

Four traditions, not one. “On the leather” means the letters physically survive on the scroll, as against letters an editor has supplied to fill a hole in it — a restoration is a scholar’s reading, not a reading of the manuscript. Words in [square brackets] are supplied; the notes count them apart from what survives.

The map of this verse — what each word keeps company with

This is a map of two things, both counted rather than judged. Company kept: which words stand within three words of each of these, anywhere in the Hebrew Bible — the thicker the line, the more often the pair meet compared with chance. Built from: the words a word is made out of, taken from its own Strong’s entry. It is not a map of meaning: nothing here claims two words mean the same thing. Click any circle to see the numbers behind it.

Lexicons — every word in Nehemiah 10:20

One dossier per word, with every reference work grouped by kind — Hebrew lexicons, morphology, Bible dictionaries, topical chains and the English of the translators themselves. The verse sits at the head of each block with the word under study lit, so you never lose your place. The panel above gives the short answer; this is the long one, and it is the part of the page worth indexing.

Every entry below is the lexicographer's own text. On the Hebrew: Brown-Driver-Briggs entire and its gloss set, Strong's Hebrew Dictionary, and Tyndale House's Translators Brief lexicon. Where a cell says a work has no entry, that work genuinely has none for this word.