What Does 1 Kings 20:21 Mean?
And the king of Israel went out, and struck the horses and chariots, and struck down the Syrians with a great blow.
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 king of Israel went out, and smote the horses and chariots, and slew the Syrians with a great slaughter.THE KEY
“Smote” and “slaughter” share the Hebrew root for striking: the same blow reaches the war horses, chariots, and people.
THE MEANING
You meet victory here with its machinery and human cost still visible: horses and chariots are struck, and the Syrians are killed in a great slaughter. The verse names mass death plainly, without dissolving it into an abstract triumph.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A victory can be separated from its cost: here, the defeat includes the destruction of horses, chariots, and people.
THE ROOT
וַיַּךְ
wayyaḵ
GROWS FROM
נכה
n-k-h
To strike or smite; its noun form names a blow, plague, or defeat.
“struck” in this verse is wayyaḵ. The Hebrew repeats the root נכה: the king strikes, then the outcome is called a great makkāh, a great blow. “Slaughter” conveys the deaths, while the shared root also links the action to its devastating result.
ALSO GROWS
makkāh: A blow, plague, or defeat.
מַכָּה
The verse uses this noun in “a great slaughter”; it shares its root with “smote,” making the result echo the act of striking.
makkēh: One who strikes; a striker.
מַכֶּה
This participial form names the one carrying out the action, extending the root from the striker to the blow and its aftermath.
THE PATTERN
In battle, a decisive blow reaches both the instruments of war and the people caught within its force.
And the waters turned back and covered the chariots and the horsemen, all the army of the Great House that came after them into the sea; not even one of them remained.He halts wars to the edge of the earth; he breaks the bow, and cuts the spear in two; he burns the wagons in the fire.So that you may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of commanders, and the flesh of the strong ones, and the flesh of horses, and of those who sit on them, and the flesh of all, both the free and the servants, both small and great.THE THREAD
And they pitched one over against the other seven days. And so it was, that on the seventh day the battle was joined; and the children of Israel struck down of the Syrians a hundred thousand men on foot in one day.The Hebrew again uses נכה (nāḵāh, “strike”) for “slew,” the same root that joins “smote” to “great slaughter” here. In this later battle, the repeated strike is counted as a hundred thousand deaths in one day, making the scale of the violence explicit.
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