What Does 1 Kings 20:21 Mean in the King James?
And the king of Israel went out, and smote the horses and chariots, and slew the Syrians with a great slaughter.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
“Smote” and “slaughter” share the Hebrew root for striking: the same blow reaches the war horses, chariots, and people.
THE MEANING
You meet victory here with its machinery and human cost still visible: horses and chariots are struck, and the Syrians are killed in a great slaughter. The verse names mass death plainly, without dissolving it into an abstract triumph.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A victory can be separated from its cost: here, the defeat includes the destruction of horses, chariots, and people.
THE ROOT
וַיַּךְ
wayyaḵ
GROWS FROM
נכה
n-k-h
To strike or smite; its noun form names a blow, plague, or defeat.
“smote / slaughter” in this verse is wayyaḵ. The Hebrew repeats the root נכה: the king strikes, then the outcome is called a great makkāh, a great blow. “Slaughter” conveys the deaths, while the shared root also links the action to its devastating result.
ALSO GROWS
makkāh: A blow, plague, or defeat.
מַכָּה
The verse uses this noun in “a great slaughter”; it shares its root with “smote,” making the result echo the act of striking.
makkēh: One who strikes; a striker.
מַכֶּה
This participial form names the one carrying out the action, extending the root from the striker to the blow and its aftermath.
THE PATTERN
In battle, a decisive blow reaches both the instruments of war and the people caught within its force.
And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.THE THREAD
And they pitched one over against the other seven days. And so it was, that in the seventh day the battle was joined: and the children of Israel slew of the Syrians an hundred thousand footmen in one day.The Hebrew again uses נכה (nāḵāh, “strike”) for “slew,” the same root that joins “smote” to “great slaughter” here. In this later battle, the repeated strike is counted as a hundred thousand deaths in one day, making the scale of the violence explicit.
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