What Does 2 Kings 6:25 Mean?
And there was a great hunger in Samaria, and look, they pressed against it, until a donkey's head sold for eighty pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver.
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 there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.THE KEY
The prices expose the siege: when a city is sealed, even the grotesque becomes part of the economy of survival.
THE MEANING
Here scarcity is measured against the body: an ass’s head costs fourscore pieces of silver, and a fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung costs five. The siege closes ordinary supply until even the least desirable remnants enter the market at desperate prices. The verse reveals what confinement does wherever it narrows access to life’s necessities now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a market price always expresses ordinary value: under siege, price registers the desperation created by blocked provision.
THE ROOT
צָרִים
tsarim
GROWS FROM
צָרַר
tsarar
To bind, confine, or press in; by extension, to besiege.
“pressed against it” in this verse is tsarim. The word makes the pressure spatial: the city is bound in from outside. The related form צַר (tsar, narrow or distressing) carries the sense of constriction, so the famine’s prices belong to a city whose ordinary flow of provision has been squeezed shut.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow, tight, or distressing.
צַר
This related form makes the siege’s constriction audible: the city’s narrowing access to food drives the prices in the verse.
tsarar: To bind, confine, or press in.
צָרַר
This is the root verb behind the besiegers’ action; the shortage is enforced by a city held in.
רָעָב
ra’av
GROWS FROM
רָעַב
r-ʿ-b
To hunger; hunger or famine.
The same word-family names both the condition and the hungry body within it. English makes famine sound like an event around people; the Hebrew keeps hunger close to the people experiencing it, which is why the verse measures the crisis in food prices.
ALSO GROWS
ra’ev: Hungry.
רָעֵב
This form names the person who bears the famine; the verse’s scarcity is bodily, not abstract.
ra’av: Hunger or famine.
רָעָב
The noun names the condition that makes even an ass’s head and dove’s dung costly.
THE PATTERN
Scarcity compresses life until provision becomes the measure of survival.
They will not be shamed in the evil time, and in the days of hunger they will be filled.Better are the pierced by the sword than the pierced by hunger, for these are emptied and split open for want of the fruits of the field.And when he had used up everything, a strong hunger came upon that land, and he began to fall short.THE THREAD
And they shall cross through it, stiff and hungry; and it shall come to pass, when they hunger, that they shall be angry, and curse their king and their God, and turn their faces upward.The Hebrew word-family רָעָב (ra’av, hunger or famine) appears in both verses. Second Kings shows hunger’s prices; Isaiah traces its pressure into agitation and accusation.
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