What Does 2 Chronicles 21:19 Mean in the King James?
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.
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 exposes both a body overtaken by sickness and the public honor withheld after death.
THE MEANING
Sickness is shown at full bodily scale here: the inner parts come out, and death follows. Then the verse names another exposure, the people make no burning for him like the one made for his fathers, leaving that public honor absent too.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that inherited rank guarantees public honor at death breaks here: even a king can be denied the rite given to his fathers.
THE ROOT
שְׂרֵפָה
serephah
GROWS FROM
שרף
To burn or consume with fire.
The same word names the burning withheld from him and the burning his fathers received, so the absence is specific: a public sign of honor is missing. The root carries the force of consuming fire, while the verse makes its absence part of how his death is marked.
ALSO GROWS
saraph: To burn or consume.
שָׂרַף
It gives the literal action beneath the funeral burning named in the verse.
seraphim: Fiery or burning ones.
שְׂרָפִים
This branch preserves the root’s image of fire in another Hebrew word family.
תַּחֲלוּאִים
tachalu'im
GROWS FROM
חלה
To be sick or weak.
“diseases” in this verse is tachalu'im. The word family keeps the cause close to the body: sickness is not an abstract misfortune here, but a condition that overtakes him physically. Beside the blunt image of his insides coming out, it leaves little distance between illness and death.
ALSO GROWS
choleh: A sick person.
חוֹלֶה
The same root names the person in the state of sickness.
machalah: Illness or disease.
מַחֲלָה
This branch names the condition itself, echoing the verse’s repeated focus on bodily sickness.
THE PATTERN
The living make honor or its absence visible through how they prepare for burial, treat the body, and remember the dead.
And they buried him in his own sepulchres, which he had made for himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art: and they made a very great burning for him.And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done: this is also vanity.For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.THE THREAD
And they buried him in his own sepulchres, which he had made for himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art: and they made a very great burning for him.The same Hebrew noun, שְׂרֵפָה (serephah, burning), appears in both verses. Asa receives a “very great burning”; here, the same rite is withheld, making the difference in public honor visible through the shared word.
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