StrongerBible

motah

מוֹטָה

HebrewH4133“yoke, bars, ...”

Appears 12 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Lev 26:131Ch 15:15Isa 58:6 (2×)Isa 58:9Jer 27:2Jer 28:10Jer 28:12Jer 28:13 (2×)Ezk 30:18Ezk 34:27
Root family
Word studyResearch-grademoh-TAHnoun

What motah means

the wooden crossbar borne on the neck or shoulders: nearly always the bar of a yoke, and so the Bible's standing picture of forced servitude

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

A yoke in the ancient world was not one solid piece. A wooden crossbar lay over the neck of the animal or the person, and cords tied it in place underneath. This word names the bar itself, the rigid timber, as distinct from the yoke as a whole (עֹל) and from the flexible ties that fastened it (מוֹסֵר). Jeremiah is told to make both and wear them together, and the phrase "the bars of your yoke" sets the two words side by side in one breath.

Because the bar is the hard part, it is the part that gets broken, and that is how a piece of farm equipment became one of the Bible's great images of rescue. Leviticus 26:13 is the source text: God broke the bars of Israel's yoke and made them walk upright. Every later promise to break a yoke echoes that sentence, and the picture stays physical. People under a yoke stoop; people set free stand straight.

What the bar stands for shifts with the oppressor:

  • In Leviticus it is the slavery Israel came out of in Egypt.
  • In Jeremiah it is Babylon's dominion, which God has deliberately imposed, so that snapping the wooden bar only invites an iron one.
  • In Ezekiel it is Egypt's own grip on the nations, smashed in a reversal for the country that had been the great yoke-layer.
  • In Isaiah it is the exploitation of the poor by their own neighbors, which real fasting is supposed to dismantle.

One passage steps outside all of this. In 1 Chronicles 15:15 the same word names the plain poles on which the Levites carry the ark on their shoulders, with no thought of servitude at all. That is a useful reminder of what the word literally is: a bar under a load. The related verb of this family means "to sway" or "to give way" (מוט), and a pole under weight is exactly the thing that bends.

Nuances

1athe bar of a yoke as a real object: the timber fastened over a neck, which can be worn, lifted off, and snapped in two
Jer 27:2Jer 28:10Jer 28:12Jer 28:13 (2×)
1ba yoke as the picture of subjection: the grip of slavery, empire, or exploitation that God promises to break
Lev 26:13Isa 58:6 (2×)Isa 58:9Ezk 30:18Ezk 34:27
Isa 58:6

What the yoke of Isaiah 58:6 stands for.

  • majorityThe social and economic oppression of the poor inside the community: debt, forced labor, and neglect of the hungry, which genuine fasting is meant to dismantle.; J. Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56-66, Anchor Bible 19B (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 176; J. N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40-66, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); B. S. Childs, Isaiah, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001); J. Goldingay, Isaiah 56-66, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2014)
  • minorityThe grip of an entrenched priestly leadership on a visionary group inside the restoration community, making the yoke an image of a struggle within Israel over who controls worship.; P. D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979)
  • minorityThe opponents in these chapters are syncretistic worshippers of the Lord rather than a priestly establishment, which removes the ground for reading the yoke as a struggle over control of worship.; B. Schramm, The Opponents of Third Isaiah: Reconstructing the Cultic History of the Restoration, JSOTSup 193 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995)
1ca pole for carrying a load on the shoulders
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyStrong
1Ch 15:15

What scholars say about motah

The lexicons are united on this word. BDB glosses it "pole, bar of yoke" and notes that it is mostly late, citing the older archaeological descriptions of the ancient yoke by Schumacher and Benzinger; HALOT renders it "yoke, yoke-bar, crossbar"; Gesenius (18th ed.) gives Jochstange and Querholz; DCH treats it as its own entry beside the verb and the masculine noun of the same root. Arnulf Baumann's TDOT article unifies the whole family under the idea of deviation from an accustomed position, of the sort seen in the beam of a scale or the bending of a pole, while conceding the awkward fact that the verb and the two nouns never occur in the same context in the Hebrew Bible. That question of derivation remains live, but it does not touch the sense of this noun, on which there is no disagreement.

The individual passages carry most of the discussion. Milgrom treats Leviticus 26:13 as the covenantal source text for the entire yoke-breaking motif, stressing the rare adverb for walking upright: the enslaved stoop, the redeemed stand straight. On Jeremiah 27 and 28, Holladay and Lundbom defend the sign-act and its escalation from wooden to iron bars as authentic prophetic intensification, with the theological point that the Lord has now imposed the yoke as discipline, so that a false prophet's yoke-breaking only makes it heavier; Carroll instead reads the whole complex as a heavily redacted post-exilic construction against false prophets, and Sawyer argues independently that iron in such biblical expressions means invincible rather than literally metallurgical. Zimmerli and Block read Ezekiel 30:18 as an ironic reversal in which the paradigmatic yoke-imposer becomes the yoke-broken. On Isaiah 58, Blenkinsopp, Oswalt, Childs and Goldingay read the yoke as social and economic oppression inside the community, while Hanson reads it as the yoke of an entrenched priestly hierocracy, a reading Schramm has systematically opposed on the ground that the opponents of these chapters are syncretistic Yahwists. For the single carrying-pole use in 1 Chronicles 15:15, Levine and Milgrom describe a graded hierarchy of cultic transport in which such an ad-hoc pole is distinguished from the permanent staves inserted through the rings of the ark.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 556-557, s.v. מוֹטָהlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), vol. II, s.v. מוֹטָהlexicon
  • DCH (D. J. A. Clines, ed.), Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993-2011), vol. V, s.v. מוֹטָהlexicon
  • H. Donner et al., Wilhelm Gesenius Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2012), s.v. מוטlexicon
  • A. Baumann, "מוט mwt," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. VIII (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 152-158theological-dictionary
  • NIDOTTE (W. VanGemeren, ed.), New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), vol. 2, s.v. מוטtheological-dictionary
  • J. Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Bible 3B (New York: Doubleday, 2001)commentary
  • J. E. Hartley, Leviticus, WBC 4 (Dallas: Word, 1992), 465, 470-471commentary
  • W. L. Holladay, Jeremiah 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapters 26-52, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989)commentary
  • J. R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21-36, Anchor Yale Bible 21B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)commentary
  • R. P. Carroll, Jeremiah, OTL (London: SCM; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986)commentary
  • J. F. A. Sawyer, "The Meaning of barzel in the Biblical Expressions of Chariots of Iron, Yokes of Iron, etc.," in Midian, Moab and Edom, JSOTSup 24 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983), 129-134article
  • W. Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983)commentary
  • D. I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25-48, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)commentary
  • J. Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56-66, Anchor Bible 19B (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 176commentary
  • J. N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40-66, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)commentary
  • J. Goldingay, Isaiah 56-66, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2014)commentary
  • P. D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979)monograph
  • B. Schramm, The Opponents of Third Isaiah: Reconstructing the Cultic History of the Restoration, JSOTSup 193 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995)monograph
  • B. A. Levine, Numbers 1-20, Anchor Bible 4A (New York: Doubleday, 1993)commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of מוֹטָה

f p construct

מֹטוֹת, מוֹטֹת, מֹטֹת

Jer 28:13, Ezk 30:18, Ezk 34:27, Jer 28:13, Lev 26:13

f s absolute

מוֹטָה, הַמּוֹטָה

Isa 58:6, Isa 58:6, Isa 58:9, Jer 28:10, Jer 28:12

f p absolute

מֹטוֹת, מֹּטוֹת

Jer 27:2, 1Ch 15:15