What Does 2 Chronicles 32:10 Mean in the King James?
Thus saith Sennacherib king of Assyria, Whereon do ye trust, that ye abide in the siege in Jerusalem?
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 siege measures Jerusalem’s walls, but the taunt reaches for the hidden structure beneath them: what actually makes you secure?
THE MEANING
When pressure encloses your world, this question asks what you trust while you remain inside it. The threat assumes that visible confinement can settle where security comes from, but the verse leaves that assumption exposed as a challenge rather than an answer.
THE ROOT
בֹּטְחִים
botechim
GROWS FROM
בטח
To trust, feel secure, or be confident.
“trust” in this verse is botechim. Batach points to felt security, not simply saying that you believe something. The taunt makes the city’s enclosure a test of where that security actually rests.
ALSO GROWS
mivtach: Security, refuge, or a source of confidence.
מִבְטָח
This branch makes the question “Whereon?” concrete: it asks what is serving as the people’s refuge.
betach: Securely, in safety.
בֶּטַח
The same root can describe living securely, which is precisely what the siege puts under pressure.
יְרוּשָׁלַיִם
Yerushalayim
GROWS FROM
שלם
Whole, complete; wholeness.
“Jerusalem” in this verse is Yerushalayim. Yerushalayim carries the shalom resonance of wholeness, and the verse speaks of that named wholeness as surrounded. The tension holds the movement from narrowing toward wholeness inside a single question.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness, well-being.
שָׁלוֹם
Its sound and meaning echo in Yerushalayim, placing wholeness at the center of the siege’s threat.
shalem: Whole, complete.
שָׁלֵם
This related form gives the city’s name a sense beyond geography: the threat presses against what is whole.
THE PATTERN
Pressure exposes where security rests.
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead:THE THREAD
Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation.Isaiah uses the same Hebrew verb, batach, when the speaker says, “I will trust.” That line answers the taunt by naming a ground of trust while danger is still real.
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