What Does 2 Samuel 20:20 Mean?
And Joab answered and said, Far be it, far be it from me, that I should swallow up or ruin.
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 Joab answered and said, Far be it, far be it from me, that I should swallow up or destroy.THE KEY
The refusal names two thresholds of destruction: to engulf a whole life, and to ruin what remains.
THE MEANING
A voice in conflict names a hard boundary: no consuming the whole, no ruining what remains. The verse speaks to the reader as a present possibility: pressure can meet a limit. Its two verbs make that limit concrete, engulfment and ruin.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that once conflict begins, total ruin is inevitable.
THE ROOT
לִבְלֹעַ
livloʿa
GROWS FROM
בלע
b-l-ʿ
to swallow, engulf, or consume
“swallow up” in this verse is livloʿa. The Hebrew opens the image of being taken in whole. Beside the next verb, it makes the refusal name two kinds of erasure: engulfment and ruin.
ALSO GROWS
niblaʿēm: “Let us swallow them up” (Proverbs 1:12)
נִבְלָעֵם
The same root pictures people being taken whole, making the scale of the threatened harm vivid.
livloʿa: “To swallow up” (Jonah 1:17)
לִבְלֹעַ
The root also describes literal engulfment, preserving the force of the image in Joab’s refusal.
לְהַשְׁחִית
lehashchit
GROWS FROM
שחת
š-ḥ-t
to ruin, spoil, corrupt, or destroy
This root also describes corruption, where something is spoiled from within. Together with “swallow up,” it shows the refusal reaching beyond immediate violence to the ruin of what is there.
ALSO GROWS
hishchit: “Had corrupted” (Genesis 6:12)
הִשְׁחִית
The same root describes a way of life becoming ruined, not only something being physically destroyed.
ləshaḥēt: “To destroy” (Genesis 9:11)
לְשַׁחֵת
Here the root names the destruction of the earth, showing its reach from individual harm to what sustains life.
THE PATTERN
Scripture marks a boundary between the power to ruin and allowing ruin to consume everything.
And God looked upon the earth, and look, it was ruined, for all flesh had ruined its way upon the earth.And I will raise up my covenant with you; never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.But if your brother is pained because of your food, you are no longer walking in love. Do not, by your food, make him lose his way, the one for whom the Anointed One died.THE THREAD
Let us swallow them living, as the grave does, and whole, as those who go down into the cistern.The verb behind “swallow them up” shares the root בלע (b-l-ʿ, to swallow or engulf) with Joab’s refusal. Proverbs gives the image as a proposal to take people whole, letting the reader hear the full force of what the refusal denies.
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