What Does 2 Chronicles 21:15 Mean in the King James?
And thou shalt have great sickness by disease of thy bowels, until thy bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day.
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
The verse turns illness into a collapse of the body’s boundary: what should remain inside comes out, day after day.
THE MEANING
You encounter sickness as relentless and bodily: the bowels themselves are afflicted until the body’s interior comes out, day after day. The repeated wording leaves no distance between disease and its physical consequence.
THE ROOT
מֵעֶיךָ
meʿeykha
GROWS FROM
מעה
m-ʿ-h
The inner parts, bowels, or intestines, the body’s interior.
“bowels” in this verse is meʿeykha. The word keeps the scene anchored in the body’s actual interior, not a vague inner life. The verse pairs that interior with יֵצְאוּ (yēṣəʾū, they go out): what is normally contained within the body crosses outward.
ALSO GROWS
meʿay: A possessive form for the inward parts.
מֵעַי
Jeremiah 4:19 uses the same word in a cry of pain, showing that it can name inner distress as well as anatomical organs.
mimmeʿeykha: From within one’s own inward parts; in Genesis 15:4, the phrase refers to offspring.
מִמֵּעֶיךָ
There the word names what comes from within; here it names the interior forced outward.
חֳלִי
ḥŏlî
GROWS FROM
חלה
ḥ-l-h
To be sick or become weak.
“sickness / disease” in this verse is ḥŏlî. The Hebrew forms translated “sickness” and “disease” share חלה (ḥālāh, to be sick or grow weak). Their recurrence makes illness press through the sentence and continue day after day.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōleh: Someone who is sick or ill.
חוֹלֶה
The same root can name the person experiencing the condition, keeping the verse’s focus on bodily suffering.
maḥălāh: An illness or disease.
מַחֲלָה
This noun from the same root echoes the verse’s repeated naming of sickness as an ongoing condition.
THE PATTERN
Scripture sometimes makes bodily ruin visible by showing the body’s inward parts crossing outward.
And it came to pass, that in process of time, after the end of two years, his bowels fell out by reason of his sickness: so he died of sore diseases. And his people made no burning for him, like the burning of his fathers.But Amasa took no heed to the sword that was in Joab’s hand: so he smote him therewith in the fifth rib, and shed out his bowels to the ground, and struck him not again; and he died. So Joab and Abishai his brother pursued after Sheba the son of Bichri.Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.THE THREAD
And, behold, the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.Both verses use מֵעֶיךָ (meʿeykha, your bowels or innards), the same word for the body’s interior. Genesis uses it for life coming from within; here, the inside itself comes out, making the two directions, source and rupture, sharply visible.
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