What Does Isaiah 24:12 Mean?
In the city is left a stunned waste, and the gate is struck with crashing.
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
In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.THE KEY
What remains inside the city is desolation, and ruin reaches even the gate, the boundary of entry and defense.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks in the present: the city’s remaining condition is desolation, and its gate is battered by ruin. The boundary that marks entry and defense is itself struck, so destruction reaches both the place and its threshold.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a city’s boundary is beyond the reach of ruin: the gate itself is smitten.
THE ROOT
נִשְׁאַר
nish'ar
GROWS FROM
שאר
sha'ar
remain; be left over
The Hebrew places the emphasis on what remains: desolation is the residue within the city. The same root can name a remnant, but here it describes what is left as ruin; the root itself does not promise restoration.
ALSO GROWS
sha'ar: remain; be left
שָׁאַר
This verb is the seed beneath “is left,” focusing the line on the condition that remains in the city.
she'ar: remnant; remainder
שְׁאָר
The same root names what survives after loss; Isaiah 10:20 uses it for Israel’s remnant, while this verse names desolation as the remainder.
שַׁמָּה
shammah
GROWS FROM
שמם
sh-m-m
be desolate; be appalled
“stunned waste” in this verse is shammah. This root holds desolation alongside the state of being appalled, so the ruin is more than empty space: it is a condition of devastation. Paired with “what remains,” desolation becomes the city’s residue.
ALSO GROWS
shamem: be desolate; be appalled
שָׁמֵם
The verbal form shows the state behind the verse’s desolation: devastation that leaves a place ruined or stunned.
shemamah: desolation; waste
שְׁמָמָה
This related noun names the wasted condition that the verse says remains within the city.
THE PATTERN
A city’s ruin reaches its shared spaces and thresholds, leaving public life exposed and emptied.
A Psalm of Asaph. O God, the nations come into your possession; they soil your set-apart temple; they set Jerusalem in heaps.I have cut off the nations; their corners stand emptied. I have dried up their streets, so that none crosses them. Their cities are cut off, so that there is no man, no one settled there.And they throw dust on their heads, and cry out, weeping and mourning, saying, Woe, woe, the great city, in which all who had ships on the sea grew rich by her costliness! For in one hour she has been emptied.THE THREAD
And it will come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and the escape of the house of Jacob, will no longer keep leaning their full weight upon the one who struck them, but they will lean their full weight upon the LORD, the Set-Apart One of Israel, in truth.Isaiah 24:12 uses שאר (sha’ar, remain/be left) in saying what remains in the city; Isaiah 10:20 uses the same root in “remnant.” The root holds both outcomes: what remains here is desolation, while elsewhere it names a people who no longer rely on the one who struck them.
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