What Does 2 Samuel 15:23 Mean?
And all the land wept with a great voice, and all the people crossed over. The king himself also crossed the brook Kidron, and all the people crossed over toward the way of the wilderness.
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 country wept with a loud voice, and all the people passed over: the king also himself passed over the brook Kidron, and all the people passed over, toward the way of the wilderness.THE KEY
The repeated crossing makes grief a threshold everyone shares, including the king.
THE MEANING
Grief is public here: the whole land gives it a loud voice. You see the king cross the same brook with the people, bringing his authority into their shared passage. The road toward the wilderness begins in a shared cry.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that rank keeps a person outside collective loss: the king crosses with the people.
THE ROOT
עָבַר
ʿāvar
GROWS FROM
ע־ב־ר
ʿ-b-r
To cross, pass over, or go through.
“crossed over” in this verse is ʿāvar. The verb repeats for the people and the king; their crossing becomes the scene’s center. Its word family reaches from the other side to transgression, so the literal passage also carries a wider sense of crossing boundaries.
ALSO GROWS
ʿēver: The other side; beyond.
עֵבֶר
The passage is literal: king and people move toward the other side together.
ʿavērah: Transgression; trespass or overstepping.
עֲבֵרָה
This branch lets physical passage and boundary crossing sit together without flattening one into the other.
THE PATTERN
Shared grief becomes audible, drawing a community around a passage of loss.
And they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is across Jordan, and there they wailed a great lamentation, heavy beyond measure. And he made a mourning for his father seven days.A great crowd of people followed him, and women who also beat their breasts and wailed for him.THE THREAD
And the priests who lifted the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood steady on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites crossed over on dry ground, until all the people had finished crossing over Jordan.The same root, ע־ב־ר (ʿ-b-r, to cross or pass over), describes the people’s movement in both verses. In Joshua it carries an entire people across Jordan; here it gathers the people and king into one crossing over Kidron.
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