What Does 2 Chronicles 21:15 Mean?
And you will have a great sickness in your bowels, until your bowels come out through the sickness, day by day.
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 thou shalt have great sickness by disease of thy bowels, until thy bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day.THE KEY
The verse turns illness into a collapse of the body’s boundary: what should remain inside comes out, day after day.
THE MEANING
You encounter sickness as relentless and bodily: the bowels themselves are afflicted until the body’s interior comes out, day after day. The repeated wording leaves no distance between disease and its physical consequence.
THE ROOT
מֵעֶיךָ
meʿeykha
GROWS FROM
מעה
m-ʿ-h
The inner parts, bowels, or intestines, the body’s interior.
“bowels” in this verse is meʿeykha. The word keeps the scene anchored in the body’s actual interior, not a vague inner life. The verse pairs that interior with יֵצְאוּ (yēṣəʾū, they go out): what is normally contained within the body crosses outward.
ALSO GROWS
meʿay: A possessive form for the inward parts.
מֵעַי
Jeremiah 4:19 uses the same word in a cry of pain, showing that it can name inner distress as well as anatomical organs.
mimmeʿeykha: From within one’s own inward parts; in Genesis 15:4, the phrase refers to offspring.
מִמֵּעֶיךָ
There the word names what comes from within; here it names the interior forced outward.
חֳלִי
ḥŏlî
GROWS FROM
חלה
ḥ-l-h
To be sick or become weak.
The Hebrew forms translated “sickness” and “disease” share חלה (ḥālāh, to be sick or grow weak). Their recurrence makes illness press through the sentence and continue day after day.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōleh: Someone who is sick or ill.
חוֹלֶה
The same root can name the person experiencing the condition, keeping the verse’s focus on bodily suffering.
maḥălāh: An illness or disease.
מַחֲלָה
This noun from the same root echoes the verse’s repeated naming of sickness as an ongoing condition.
THE PATTERN
Scripture sometimes makes bodily ruin visible by showing the body’s inward parts crossing outward.
And it happened, from days to days, after the end of two years, that his bowels came out through his sickness, and he died in evil sicknesses. And his own people did not burn for him, as they had burned for his fathers.But Amasa did not guard against the sword that was in Joab's hand, so he struck him with it in the fifth rib, and poured out his bowels to the ground, and did not strike him a second time, and he died. So Joab and Abishai his brother pursued Sheba, son of Bichri.Now this man bought a field with the wage of crookedness, and falling face first, he burst open in the middle, and all his insides poured out.THE THREAD
And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, saying, This one will not be your heir, but the one who comes forth from your own body will be your heir.Both verses use מֵעֶיךָ (meʿeykha, your bowels or innards), the same word for the body’s interior. Genesis uses it for life coming from within; here, the inside itself comes out, making the two directions, source and rupture, sharply visible.
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