What Does 2 Chronicles 28:17 Mean?
For again the Edomites had come and struck Judah, and carried away captives.
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
For again the Edomites had come and smitten Judah, and carried away captives.THE KEY
The Hebrew says “they took captive a captivity,” binding the seizure and the captive condition into one repeated root.
THE MEANING
The verse names a violence that returns: a people are struck again, and lives are carried away into captivity. Capture is not an abstract loss; people are removed from their place and held under another’s power.
THE ROOT
שֶׁבִי
shevi
GROWS FROM
שבה
To take captive, seize and carry away.
The verb וַיִּשְׁבּוּ (vayishbu, “they took captive”) and the noun שֶׁבִי (shevi, “captivity, captives”) come from the same root. The wording holds the violence and its consequence together: people are seized, and they enter the captive condition named by that same seed.
ALSO GROWS
shavah: To take captive
שָׁבָה
This is the action in the verse: people are seized and carried away.
shavuy: Captive, one held
שָׁבוּי
This names the condition that follows the act of capture.
THE PATTERN
Captivity names people seized and removed by force, while Scripture can also reverse the image by showing captivity itself led away.
And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them to Dan.But if you will not hear and respond to it, my living soul will weep in hidden places because of your swelling, and my eye will weep and run down in tears, because the flock of the LORD is led away.Therefore he says, "When he went up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts to humankind."THE THREAD
And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them to Dan.The phrase “was taken captive” grows from שָׁבָה (shavah, “to take captive”), the same Hebrew root behind “carried away captives” here. The shared root makes capture visible as both an act done to someone and a condition they are made to live in.
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