What Does 2 Kings 25:10 Mean?
And the whole host of the Chaldeans, who were with the chief of the slaughterers, tore down the walls of Jerusalem all around.
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 all the army of the Chaldees, that were with the captain of the guard, brake down the walls of Jerusalem round about.THE KEY
Jerusalem’s walls are dismantled on every side while its name carries shalom, wholeness, the verse holds their collision in view without softening either.
THE MEANING
The verse places before you a city whose walls are being torn down all around. Jerusalem’s name carries shalom, wholeness, yet the text holds that name beside literal devastation without making the broken stones less real.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a city’s walls can guarantee its safety: Jerusalem’s defenses are dismantled all around.
THE ROOT
יְרוּשָׁלַיִם
Yerushalayim
GROWS FROM
שלם
sh-l-m
To be whole or complete; wholeness.
“Jerusalem” in this verse is Yerushalayim. Yerushalayim carries the root of shalom, wholeness, and the verse places that name beside actual devastation. English gives the city’s name without exposing the collision between its named nature and what the army does to its stone enclosure.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness, completeness, peace.
שָׁלוֹם
The name’s connection to shalom makes the city’s destruction sit beside the idea of wholeness without hiding the violence.
shalem: Whole, complete.
שָׁלֵם
This branch gives the root’s sense of completeness; the verse describes the city’s physical boundary being broken apart.
סָבִיב
saviv
GROWS FROM
סבב
s-b-b
To turn, go around, or encircle.
“round about” in this verse is saviv. The wording makes the scope total: the walls are broken all around, not merely at one opening. The root’s circling sense makes the perimeter itself the site of force, leaving no side implied as intact.
ALSO GROWS
sābab: To turn, go around, or surround.
סָבַב
This verb reveals the circling motion contained in “round about”; the destruction reaches around the city.
sibbub: A circuit or round.
סִבּוּב
This noun carries the sense of a circuit, echoing the verse’s picture of the walls’ full perimeter.
נָתְצוּ
natetsu
GROWS FROM
נתץ
n-tz
To tear down or demolish.
“tore down” in this verse is natetsu. The Chaldean army is the subject of a direct act: they dismantle the city’s wall. The verb keeps the violence with its agents; the wall does not simply collapse by itself.
ALSO GROWS
natats: To tear down; to demolish.
נָתַץ
This dictionary form names the deliberate dismantling carried by the verb in the verse.
wayittetsu: And they tore down (2 Kings 10:27).
וַיִּתְּצוּ
The same root describes the demolition of Baal’s house, showing it names the dismantling of a built structure in either setting.
THE PATTERN
A city’s walls can be broken by force, and scripture holds their destruction beside the work of rebuilding.
And they burned the house of God, and broke through the wall of Jerusalem, and burned all its palaces with fire, and ruined all its delightful vessels.Do good in your favor to Zion; build the walls of Jerusalem.And they will lay you flat to the ground, you and your children within you, and will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time you were looked upon."THE THREAD
See, I have set you this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to uproot and to tear down, to make perish and to break down, to build and to plant.Jeremiah uses נתץ (natats, to tear down) in “to pull down,” the same root as “brake down” here. Its place among verbs of tearing down, building, and planting opens a wider vocabulary of dismantling, while this verse keeps the army’s destruction of Jerusalem’s walls in full view.
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