What Does 1 Kings 17:17 Mean?
After these words, the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness gripped him so that no breath remained in him.
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 it came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him.THE KEY
The missing neshamah is the very breath of life named at humanity’s first forming.
THE MEANING
You meet sickness at its stark edge: no breath remains in the child. The verse places you inside the mother’s sudden encounter with an absence that no ordinary word for illness can contain.
THE ROOT
נְשָׁמָה
neshamah
GROWS FROM
נשם
n-sh-m
To breathe or pant; breath.
Neshamah is the breath the verse says no longer remains in the child. The same word names the breath of life in Genesis 2:7, binding this absence to the language of a living human being.
ALSO GROWS
nasham: To breathe or pant.
נָשַׁם
The verb behind the noun makes neshamah an act of breathing, not an abstract possession.
neshimah: Breathing; respiration.
נְשִׁימָה
This related form names the breathing whose absence the verse describes.
THE PATTERN
Scripture ties embodied life to breath as something received and sustained.
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.All the while my breath is in me, and the breath of God is in my nostrils.Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, for he himself gives to all life and breath and all things.THE THREAD
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.Genesis names the breath of life as neshamah; 1 Kings uses that same word for the breath no longer remaining in the child. The shared root brings creation and this moment of absence into the same line of sight.
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