What Does Ezekiel 7:5 Mean?
Thus says the Lord GOD. A single harm, behold, has come.
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
Thus saith the Lord GOD; An evil, an only evil, behold, is come.THE KEY
In Hebrew, “evil” can mean calamity as well as wrongdoing, so its repetition announces harm arriving rather than merely naming a moral category.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks into the moment when calamity ceases to be remote: what was approaching now stands present. Its repeated name gives the harm no cover of softer language.
THE ROOT
רָעָה
raʿah
GROWS FROM
רעע
rāʿaʿ
To be bad or harmful; to do harm.
The Hebrew repeats רָעָה (raʿah, evil or calamity) around אַחַת (ʾaḥat, one), making the warning singular and unmistakable. The root holds badness and harm together, so “evil” reaches beyond a moral label to the calamity that arrives.
ALSO GROWS
raʿ: Bad, evil, harmful.
רַע
This adjective carries the root’s basic quality; the verse’s noun can name harm with that same quality.
hēraʿ: To do harm or act wickedly.
הֵרֵעַ
This verbal form moves from a harmful quality to harmful action, showing that the root can name both evil’s character and its doing.
THE PATTERN
A coming day of calamity is named as near or already present, bringing what is feared into the open.
The cutting off has come, the cutting off has come. It stays awake for you. Behold, it has come.Howl, for the day of the LORD is near; it will come as a ravaging from the Almighty.For the great day of their anger comes, and who is able to stand?THE THREAD
Will a ram's horn be blown in the city, and the people not tremble? Will there be evil in a city, and the LORD not have done it?Amos uses the same Hebrew word רָעָה (raʿah, evil or calamity) in its question about a city’s devastation. The shared root opens Ezekiel’s word to mean calamity and harm as well as moral evil, deepening the force of its arrival.
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