What Does 2 Samuel 21:5 Mean?
And they answered the king, The man who finished us off, and who devised against us, so that we would be wiped out from standing within any border of Israel.
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 they answered the king, The man that consumed us, and that devised against us that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the coasts of Israel,THE KEY
The threat is not merely to wound a people but to bring their very presence to an end.
THE MEANING
The verse names a threat aimed at your continued presence: someone means to consume you and remove you from every part of the land. The accusation brings that intent into the open before the king. The violence described seeks to leave no place where you remain.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that this is only incidental harm: the verse names a deliberate plan for total removal.
THE ROOT
כִּלָּנוּ
kîllānû
GROWS FROM
כלה
To be finished; to finish, consume, or bring to an end.
“finished us off” in this verse is kîllānû. כִּלָּנוּ comes from כלה, whose range includes both finishing and bringing something to an end. The following phrase sharpens that ending into an attempt to leave no one standing anywhere in Israel: the harm is named as a plan for total removal.
ALSO GROWS
kālāh: To be complete or come to an end.
כָּלָה
The same root can describe completion; here its ending carries a destructive force.
kelāyāh: Destruction, wasting away.
כְּלָיָה
This branch makes the root’s destructive edge explicit: consuming means bringing something toward its end.
THE PATTERN
When power experiences a people as a threat, its plans can turn toward removing them from the land, the nation, or life.
Come, let us be wise toward them, lest they multiply; and should war meet us, they would also add themselves to our enemies, and fight against us, and rise up out of the land.They say, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more.When they had withdrawn, look, a messenger of the LORD appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Rise, take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word, for Herod will seek the young child to make him perish.THE THREAD
For I am with you, declares the LORD, to deliver you. Though I finish all the nations where I scattered you, yet I will not finish you. I will straighten you in measure, and I will not let you go clean.The same כלה root appears twice in “make a full end,” then denies that full ending to the addressed “thee.” The shared root makes the distinction audible: the ending named here is not the only outcome carried by the word.
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