What Does 2 Chronicles 36:17 Mean in the King James?
Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand.
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 measures the conquest by what it leaves unspared: every age, and even the sanctuary.
THE MEANING
This verse confronts the reader with violence that reaches young and old and enters the sanctuary. It attributes the catastrophe to God bringing the king of the Chaldees, while the king’s own hand carries out the slaughter. Its final image, everyone given into one hand, leaves no refuge in age or sacred space.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A sanctuary is not beyond the reach of violence simply because it is set apart.
THE ROOT
חָמַל
ḥāmal
GROWS FROM
חמל
חָמַל (ḥāmal): spare, have pity; hold back from harm.
“had no compassion” in this verse is ḥāmal. English compassion can sound like an inward feeling, but חָמַל (ḥāmal, “to spare, to have pity”) also names the restraint that keeps harm from being done. Here that restraint is absent: the king holds nothing back from any age or even the sanctuary.
ALSO GROWS
vattaḥmōl: She pitied the child.
וַתַּחְמֹל
The same root describes compassion that leads to sparing; here, that protection is denied to the people under the king’s hand.
ḥemlāh: Compassion or pity; the verse uses it in the phrase “in his pity.”
חֶמְלָה
Isaiah links this same root to redemption and carrying the afflicted, making its absence here a concrete contrast: no one is spared.
מִקְדָּשׁ
miqdāsh
GROWS FROM
קדש
קָדַשׁ (qādash): be set apart, be sacred.
The word for sanctuary grows from קָדַשׁ (qādash, “to be set apart”). The verse places the sword inside that set-apart space, so the sacred setting remains part of the violence rather than a refuge from it.
ALSO GROWS
qādōsh: Set apart; sacred.
קָדוֹשׁ
This branch names what distinguishes the sanctuary, sharpening the force of the sword entering it.
qōdesh: That which is set apart; sacredness.
קֹדֶשׁ
The verse shows violence reaching into what is marked as sacred, making the invasion of the sanctuary part of the passage’s full horror.
THE PATTERN
When power is described as showing no compassion, its violence reaches across age and into places treated as sacred.
And afterward, saith the LORD, I will deliver Zedekiah king of Judah, and his servants, and the people, and such as are left in this city from the pestilence, from the sword, and from the famine, into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of those that seek their life: and he shall smite them with the edge of the sword; he shall not spare them, neither have pity, nor have mercy.Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house.Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.THE THREAD
And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children.The Hebrew root חמל (ḥāmal, “spare, have compassion”) appears when Pharaoh’s daughter sees the exposed child and has compassion on him. In Exodus that compassion preserves one child; here its absence leaves no age group spared.
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