What Does 2 Chronicles 35:25 Mean in the King James?
And Jeremiah lamented for Josiah: and all the singing men and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day, and made them an ordinance in Israel: and, behold, they are written in the lamentations.
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 Hebrew repeats one lament-root for Jeremiah’s act and the people’s dirges, showing grief move from one voice into shared memory that lasts.
THE MEANING
Your grief over a life that has changed your world can become shared speech, carried beyond the moment by those who remember. Here mourning is voiced by a community, given a lasting place in its practice, and preserved in writing.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that grief must be private or brief: here it is shared across a community and carried forward “to this day.”
THE ROOT
וַיְקוֹנֵן
wayqōnēn
GROWS FROM
קונ
q-w-n
To chant a dirge or lament.
“lamented” in this verse is wayqōnēn. The same root names Jeremiah’s act and the people’s lamentations, joining personal grief to communal song. The lament remains part of the people’s speech “to this day.”
ALSO GROWS
qinah: A lament or dirge.
קִינָה
This noun names the kind of mourning the people share in the verse.
meqonen: One who chants a lament; a mourner.
מְקוֹנֵן
It shows lament as a voiced practice that others can carry together.
חֹק
ḥoq
GROWS FROM
חקק
ḥ-q-q
To inscribe or prescribe; to establish by decree.
The word for ordinance belongs to a root associated with marking out or prescribing. The lament is given a fixed place in Israel’s shared life, rather than left as a passing expression.
ALSO GROWS
ḥaqaq: To inscribe, decree, or prescribe.
חָקַק
This verb’s sense of marking something out illuminates how the lament becomes an established practice.
mechoqeq: A lawgiver or one who decrees.
מְחֹקֵק
This related word connects the root with what is formally established.
כְּתוּבִים
ketuvim
GROWS FROM
כתב
k-t-b
To write or record.
The verse holds spoken lament and written record together. The grief is not only voiced in the present; it is also preserved for those who come later.
ALSO GROWS
ketav: Writing or script.
כְּתָב
It shows how spoken remembrance can take durable written form.
miktav: A written message or letter.
מִכְתָּב
It carries the root’s sense of preserving words beyond the moment they are spoken.
THE PATTERN
Communities carry loss by giving grief a shared voice.
And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son:Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Consider ye, and call for the mourning women, that they may come; and send for cunning women, that they may come:And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him.THE THREAD
Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Consider ye, and call for the mourning women, that they may come; and send for cunning women, that they may come:The Hebrew word-family behind “lamented” and “lamentations” here also appears in Jeremiah’s call for mourning women. The echo reveals lament as a shared language a people can carry, not only an individual’s outpouring.
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