What Does 1 Kings 20:42 Mean in the King James?
And he said unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Because thou hast let go out of thy hand a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his people.
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
What sounds like simply letting go is an active sending out of the hand, and the verdict makes that release the hinge of a life-for-life exchange.
THE MEANING
The verdict sets a brutal exchange: the king’s life for the man he released, the king’s people for the man’s people. The man is marked for destruction, and the act of releasing him is what the sentence names. The consequence is measured in lives and peoples.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that once a person leaves your hand, your responsibility for that release ends. Here, the release itself is the act judged.
THE ROOT
שִׁלַּחְתָּ
shillaḥta
GROWS FROM
שלח
sh-l-ḥ
Send out, send forth, release from one’s keeping.
“let go” in this verse is shillaḥta. The verb makes the release an action: the king sends the man out of his hand. The word-family can describe sending away or sending something forth, so the line’s release carries the force of a deliberate dispatch.
ALSO GROWS
shilluach: Sending away; dismissal.
שִׁלּוּחַ
This branch names an act of sending someone away, illuminating the active force of the king’s release.
Shiloach: Sent waters; the watercourse or pool of Shiloah.
שִׁלֹחַ
The same root can describe what is sent forth; here, it is a man who is sent out from the king’s hand.
חֶרְמִי
ḥermî
GROWS FROM
חרם
ḥ-r-m
Set apart under an irrevocable ban; in this context, devoted to destruction.
“appointed to utter destruction” in this verse is ḥermî. The phrase calls him a man of חֵרֶם (ḥērem, ‘the ban’): he is marked for destruction, not merely identified as an enemy. That makes the release a breach involving a specific charge, rather than an ordinary act of letting a captive go.
ALSO GROWS
ḥērem: The ban, or a thing devoted under it.
חֵרֶם
This noun is the status the verse names when it says the man belongs to the speaker’s ban.
heḥĕrîm: Put under the ban; devote to destruction.
הֶחֱרִים
This verbal form shows the force behind the phrase ‘appointed to utter destruction’: the man is placed under a sentence of destruction.
נַפְשְׁךָ
nafsh’kha
GROWS FROM
נפשׁ
n-p-š
The living self or person; the word can refer to a living soul or to life.
Both words rendered ‘life’ are forms of נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh, ‘living soul’ or ‘self’): the verdict matches one living self against another. The wording keeps the exchange concrete, at the scale of persons and lives.
ALSO GROWS
nephashot: Living souls, persons, or lives.
נְפָשׁוֹת
The plural shows how the word can count actual living persons, as the verse does when it pairs a life with a people.
yinnaphesh: Be refreshed; rest.
יִנָּפֵשׁ
This verbal branch shares the root and points to the condition of the living self, while the verse names a lethal exchange.
THE PATTERN
A charge placed in someone’s hands does not become consequence-free when that person releases it or leaves it undone.
But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.THE THREAD
And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,Exodus uses the Hebrew pairing נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh taḥat nephesh, ‘life for life’), the same measure expressed in 1 Kings 20:42 in suffixed forms. That shared wording makes the verdict’s accounting concrete: one person’s life is set in exchange for another’s.
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