What Does 2 Kings 25:3 Mean?
And on the ninth day of the fourth month the hunger gripped the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land.
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 on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine prevailed in the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land.THE KEY
The Hebrew pictures famine growing strong inside the city until the shared bread is gone.
THE MEANING
When famine takes hold, a whole community can be reduced to the most basic lack: bread. The verse lets that deprivation stand plainly, with food missing from the people’s hands.
THE ROOT
וַיֶּחֱזַק
vayyeḥezaq
GROWS FROM
חזק
To be strong or firm; to grow strong or take hold.
“gripped” in this verse is vayyeḥezaq. The Hebrew presents famine as the force growing strong in the city. “Prevailed” carries that sense of its power taking hold, not merely its presence.
ALSO GROWS
ḥazaq: Strong, firm
חָזָק
The same root frames the famine as a force gaining strength within the city.
ḥizzeq: Strengthen, fortify
חִזֵּק
This branch shows the root’s active force: making something strong, as famine’s grip intensifies here.
הָרָעָב
hā-rāʿāv
GROWS FROM
רעב
To hunger; to be hungry.
The word for a land’s famine and the word for a person being hungry grow from the same root. What sounds like a public crisis here is also the hunger felt by each person in the city.
ALSO GROWS
rāʿēv: Hungry
רָעֵב
The same root names the bodily hunger experienced by the people living through the famine.
rāʿāv: Hunger, famine
רָעָב
This noun gathers hunger into a condition affecting the whole city.
THE PATTERN
Famine exposes how a community’s life contracts around the absence of food.
And there was no bread in all the land, for the hunger was very heavy, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan fainted from before the face of the hunger.And when he had used up everything, a strong hunger came upon that land, and he began to fall short.THE THREAD
They will not be shamed in the evil time, and in the days of hunger they will be filled.The same Hebrew hunger-root, רעב, appears in both verses: one names the city’s famine, the other speaks of satisfaction in famine’s days. Together they hold the deprivation plainly while opening a picture in which famine does not have the final word on being fed.
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