What Does 2 Chronicles 16:10 Mean?
Then Asa was angry with the one who sees, and put him in the house of the stocks, for he raged against him over this. And Asa crushed some of the people at that time.
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
Then Asa was wroth with the seer, and put him in a prison house; for he was in a rage with him because of this thing. And Asa oppressed some of the people the same time.THE KEY
Asa’s rage escapes its target: it locks the seer away and spills into the crushing of other people.
THE MEANING
The verse holds both acts together: Asa confines the seer and crushes some of the people at the same time. Anger here does not stay inside him; it becomes coercion that reaches others.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that retaliation for a hard truth stays confined to the person who speaks it: Asa’s rage also falls on the people.
THE ROOT
וַיְרַצֵּץ
wayratsets
GROWS FROM
רצץ
To crush, break, or oppress by pressing down.
“crushed” in this verse is wayratsets. The verb for Asa’s treatment of the people comes from a word of crushing, making his anger visible as pressure imposed on others. The same root describes a bruised reed and the oppressed whom Isaiah says are to be sent free; it names the injury that can be undone.
ALSO GROWS
bruised: רָצוּץ (rātsûṣ), bruised or crushed; Isaiah 42:3
The root can describe something fragile that has been pressed and damaged, as well as people under oppression.
oppressed: רְצוּצִים (retsutsim), crushed or oppressed; Isaiah 58:6
Isaiah pairs the same word for the oppressed with sending them free, exposing crushing as something that can be released.
THE PATTERN
When power treats a confronting voice as a threat, it answers by making that voice captive.
Then Pashur struck Jeremiah the prophet, and set him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the LORD.For Herod himself had sent and seized John, and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, for he had married her.And when they had laid many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, charging the keeper of the bonds to keep them securely.THE THREAD
Is this not the fast I have chosen, to open the bonds of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to send the crushed away free, and to tear away every yoke?The word translated “oppressed” shares the root רצץ with Asa’s act of oppressing the people. Isaiah sets those crushed people beside the call to send them free and break their yoke, naming the injury and its undoing together.
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