What Does 1 Samuel 5:12 Mean?
And the men who did not die were struck with swellings, and the outcry of the city rose to the heavens.
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 men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.THE KEY
Being left alive does not mean being untouched: the survivors remain stricken, and the city’s cry rises heavenward.
THE MEANING
You can remain alive and still be under the force of harm; the verse names the painful swellings that remain in the survivors’ bodies. The city’s cry rises to heaven, giving bodily suffering and shared distress equal weight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that surviving harm means the harm is over: the living are still afflicted.
THE ROOT
שַׁוְעַת
shav'at
GROWS FROM
שוע
sh-w-ʿ
Cry out for help; call in distress.
The city’s “cry” is a cry for help, and the same Hebrew noun appears in Exodus 2:23, where the people’s cry rises to God. The verse’s wording connects a city’s suffering with a cry that reaches beyond it.
ALSO GROWS
shava: Cry out for help.
שָׁוַע
The city’s noun for “cry” shares its root with this urgent call for aid.
shav'ah: A cry for help; an outcry.
שַׁוְעָה
This is the noun form also used for the cry that rises to God in Exodus 2:23.
עֳפָלִים
ophalim
GROWS FROM
עפל
ʿ-p-l
Swell or rise into prominence; form a raised mass.
“swellings” in this verse is ophalim. The word translated “emerods” also carries the concrete image of swelling, a raised mass. That shade makes the survivors’ affliction bodily and visible.
ALSO GROWS
ophel: A mound or hill.
עֹפֶל
The shared root’s image of a raised mass gives the bodily swelling a concrete shape.
vayya'pilû: They presumed or pressed upward, as in Numbers 14:44.
וַיַּעְפִּלוּ
This verbal form shares the root’s sense of rising; here that upward image belongs to the painful swellings.
THE PATTERN
A cry born of suffering rises beyond the sufferer and reaches toward heaven.
And in those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel groaned from the labor, and they cried out, and their outcry rose up to God from the labor.In my narrow place I call out to the LORD, and I cry out to my God. From his temple he hears and answers my voice, and my cry comes into his ears.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
And in those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel groaned from the labor, and they cried out, and their outcry rose up to God from the labor.This verse uses the same Hebrew root שוע (sh-w-ʿ), meaning “cry out for help,” and pairs the cry with the same verb for going up. The shared wording reveals a recurring image of distress rising toward God.
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