What Does 2 Chronicles 16:13 Mean?
And Asa lay down with his fathers, and died in the forty-first year of his reign.
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 Asa slept with his fathers, and died in the one and fortieth year of his reign.THE KEY
Asa’s ending is held in two forms at once: a lying down among his fathers and an explicit death.
THE MEANING
This line brings the limit of a human life into view now: an ending can be pictured as lying down among those who came before, while death is still named plainly. The count of Asa’s years makes that limit concrete.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that the sleep image makes death merely figurative: the verse follows it with “and died.”
THE ROOT
וַיִּשְׁכַּב
vayishkav
GROWS FROM
שכב
shakab
To lie down; to sleep.
“lay down with” in this verse is vayishkav. English “sleep” can sound like a self-contained metaphor, while the Hebrew form belongs to the root שכב (shakab, to lie down or sleep). Set beside “with his fathers,” it pictures death as lying down among the ancestral line; the following verb still names death directly.
ALSO GROWS
mishkav: Bed; a place for lying down.
מִשְׁכָּב
This bed or lying place makes visible how the image of lying down sits beneath the death formula.
shokhev: One who lies down.
שֹׁכֵב
This form keeps “sleep” connected to the posture of lying down that the verse uses to picture Asa’s ending.
וַיָּמָת
vayyamat
GROWS FROM
מוּת
mut
To die.
“died” in this verse is vayyamat. The root מוּת (mut, to die) supplies the unambiguous close after the image of sleep. The verse holds the image and the death itself in the same sentence.
ALSO GROWS
mavet: Death.
מָוֶת
The noun gives the event its direct name, matching the verse’s plain statement that Asa died.
met: Dead; a deceased person.
מֵת
This form names the state that follows the death described in the verse.
THE PATTERN
Death can be described as sleep or lying down while the text continues to treat it as a real ending.
And the LORD said to Moses, Behold, you are lying down with your fathers, and this people will rise up and go whoring after the unrecognized gods of the land into whose midst they are coming, and they will let go of me and break my covenant which I have cut with them.So David lay down with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.But Jesus had spoken of his death, though they thought he had spoken of rest in sleep.THE THREAD
So David lay down with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.David is described with the same Hebrew verb שכב (shakab, to lie down or sleep) and the same phrase, “with his fathers.” The shared wording places Asa’s ending inside a recurring image of death among those who came before, while David’s burial makes the ending tangible.
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