What Does 2 Chronicles 23:15 Mean?
So they laid hands on her, and she came by the way of the entering of the horse gate to the king's house, and there they put her to death.
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
So they laid hands on her; and when she was come to the entering of the horse gate by the king’s house, they slew her there.THE KEY
The verse traces how power takes hold of a body, carries it to a named gate, and kills it there.
THE MEANING
The verse makes violence legible as a sequence: hands seize, a woman reaches a named gate, and people kill her there. It keeps the place attached to the act, making the killing concrete and bodily rather than an abstraction.
THE ROOT
וַיַּמִיתוּהָ
wayyamîtûhā
GROWS FROM
מות
m-w-t
Die; in this verb form, cause to die.
The Hebrew verb is causative: they cause her to die. Its root also names dying and death, keeping the act and its bodily consequence joined in a way the single English word “slew” can conceal.
ALSO GROWS
māvet: Death.
מָוֶת
The noun names the outcome of the action described here, from the same root.
mēt: A dead person; one who has died.
מֵת
This branch names the person in the state the verb brings about.
mût: To die.
מוּת
The basic verb connects their act of causing death to the experience of dying.
וַיָּשִׂימוּ
wayyāśîmû
GROWS FROM
שים
ś-y-m
Put, place, set.
The phrase translated “laid hands on her” uses the ordinary verb “set” with “hands”: force is shown as something placed directly on her body. The same root can describe setting the heart toward something, so the verse’s physical setting of hands carries a force that English idiom can blur.
ALSO GROWS
śîm: To put, place, or set.
שִׂים
This is the basic verb behind the action of laying hands on her.
śām: He put or set.
שָׂם
This form shows the root in a simple act of placing.
śîmû ləvavkhem: Set your hearts; attend.
שִׂימוּ לְבַבְכֶם
The same root can place attention inward; here the hands are set upon another person.
THE PATTERN
Violent power marks a killing by forcing a person beyond a boundary and naming the place where death occurs.
And two men, sons of Belial, came in and settled before him, and the men of Belial bore witness against him, even against Naboth, before the people, saying, Naboth blessed God and the king. Then they brought him out of the city, and stoned him with stones, and he died.And they threw him out of the city and stoned him, and the witnesses laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man called Saul.So Jesus also, that he might set the people apart through his own blood, suffered outside the gate.THE THREAD
And two men, sons of Belial, came in and settled before him, and the men of Belial bore witness against him, even against Naboth, before the people, saying, Naboth blessed God and the king. Then they brought him out of the city, and stoned him with stones, and he died.Naboth’s “he died” uses the same root, מות, as the causative “they slew her” here: one scene names people causing death, the other names a man dying after he is carried outside. The shared root joins the act to its bodily result, while both verses trace violence across a boundary.
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