What Does 2 Chronicles 21:14 Mean?
Behold, the LORD will strike your people with a great blow, and your children, and your wives, and all your goods.
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
Behold, with a great plague will the LORD smite thy people, and thy children, and thy wives, and all thy goods:THE KEY
The Hebrew repeats the same root in “smite” and “plague,” revealing the plague as the strike’s named form.
THE MEANING
The verse holds a threat of bodily and collective harm before you: the blow reaches the people, children, wives, and all goods named in its widening list. It makes the violence concrete, naming the lives and livelihood caught in the threat.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that the threatened judgment is private to the king is undone: the text names his people, children, wives, and possessions as within its reach.
THE ROOT
נֹגֵף
nogef
GROWS FROM
נגף
to strike or smite
The verb נֹגֵף (nogef, striking) sits beside מַגֵּפָה (maggephah, plague), both from the root נגף (n-g-p). English gives the blow and the affliction separate words; Hebrew echoes the strike in both, as it reaches people, children, wives, and goods.
ALSO GROWS
nagaph: strike, smite
נָגַף
This verb names the action voiced by נֹגֵף (nogef, striking) in the verse.
maggephah: plague; a striking or blow
מַגֵּפָה
This is the verse’s noun for the affliction, formed from the same root as “smite.”
negeph: plague, blow
נֶגֶף
Numbers 16:46 uses this related noun for a plague, carrying the same strike-root into harm spreading through a congregation.
THE PATTERN
Scripture describes judgment as a striking or plague that lands in bodies, from an individual life to whole communities.
For the LORD will cross through to strike the Egyptians; and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will leap over the opening, and will not give the ruiner leave to come into your houses to strike you.About ten days later, the LORD struck Nabal, and he died.And I perceive another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven messengers holding the seven last blows, for in them the seething of God reaches its end.THE THREAD
And Moses said to Aaron, Take a censer, and place fire upon it from the altar, and set incense upon it, and go quickly to the congregation, and make a covering for them, for the boiling over has gone out from the face of the LORD. The striking has begun.Here “the plague” is הַנֶּגֶף (hannegeph, the plague), from the same root נגף (n-g-p) as “smite” and מַגֵּפָה (maggephah, plague) in this verse. The shared root makes the action and the outbreak one image: the blow is present in the name of the plague.
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