What Does 2 Kings 17:22 Mean in the King James?
For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them;
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 repeated misses become a path when no one turns away from them.
THE MEANING
A pattern of missing becomes a way of walking when it is repeated without a turn away. What remains unturned shapes the next step, until a familiar path feels like the only one.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that repeating a pattern leaves you unchanged: the repeated way is already shaping where you go.
THE ROOT
חַטֹּאות
ḥaṭṭōʾṯ
GROWS FROM
חטא
To miss, err, or go wrong.
English “sins” can sound like a list of offenses; the Hebrew shares the seed for missing or going wrong. Here the misses are plural, and Israel’s continued walk makes them a repeated direction rather than isolated failures.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss; to do wrong.
חָטָא
The repeated sins are misses repeated as a pattern.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: A missing or sin; also an offering for the missing.
חַטָּאת
The same root can name both the missing and an offering for it, while this verse focuses on misses that keep repeating.
סָרוּ
sārû
GROWS FROM
סור
To turn aside, depart, or remove.
“departed not” in this verse is sārû. The verb pictures the turn aside they do not make. “Departed” also carries the sense of leaving; here the Hebrew makes the missing turn from the path especially clear.
ALSO GROWS
sûr: To turn aside or depart.
סוּר
This is the turn away that would interrupt the repeated course.
hēsîr: To remove or take away.
הֵסִיר
The root also carries removal: what remains in place is the pattern they do not turn from.
THE PATTERN
A repeated direction becomes a way of walking, and a different walk begins with turning from the old course.
They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward, and not forward.Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.THE THREAD
Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.The same חטא root appears in “sinful,” where the missing describes a people, not only an act. Beside 2 Kings, it opens the possibility that a repeated pattern can become the path a person inhabits.
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