Bible Strands
Ezekiel 34:21
Since you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak ones with your horns until you have scattered them abroad,
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — God addresses Israel's corrupt leaders, identified as shepherds, immediately after declaring He will judge between the strong and the weak sheep.
The words — The Hebrew יַ֗עַן (ya‘an) means "because," introducing the cause for judgment, while תֶּהְדֹּ֔פוּ (tehḏōp̄û) and תְּנַגְּח֖וּ (tənaḡḥû) literally describe the physical acts of pushing with the shoulder and thrusting with horns.
The thread — This violent butting imagery continues the indictment of Ezekiel 34:3, where shepherds consume the flock's fat and wool without feeding them, and directly sets up the divine resolution in Ezekiel 34:22 to save the flock and judge between sheep.
Why it lands — The passage states that leadership exercised through force and exploitation provokes direct divine intervention, requiring readers to evaluate how authority is applied to the vulnerable.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
Because ye have thrust with side and with shoulder, and pushed all the diseased with your horns, till ye have scattered them abroad;
Cross-references
- Deuteronomy 33:17 His majesty is like a firstborn bull, and his horns are like those of a wild ox. With them he will gore the nations, even to the ends of the earth. Such are the myriads of Ephraim, and such are the thousands of Manasseh.”
- Ezekiel 34:3 You eat the fat, wear the wool, and butcher the fattened sheep, but you do not feed the flock.
- Zechariah 11:5 whose buyers slaughter them without remorse. Those who sell them say, ‘Blessed be the LORD, for I am rich!’ Even their own shepherds have no compassion on them.
- Zechariah 11:16 For behold, I will raise up a shepherd in the land who will neither care for the lost, nor seek the young, nor heal the broken, nor sustain the healthy, but he will devour the flesh of the choice sheep and tear off their hooves.
- Luke 13:14 But the synagogue leader was indignant that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath. “There are six days for work,” he told the crowd. “So come and be healed on those days and not on the Sabbath.”
- Daniel 8:3 Then I lifted up my eyes and saw a ram with two horns standing beside the canal. The horns were long, but one was longer than the other, and the longer one grew up later.