What Does 2 Kings 2:19 Mean in the King James?
And the men of the city said unto Elisha, Behold, I pray thee, the situation of this city is pleasant, as my lord seeth: but the water is naught, and the ground barren.
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 ground is called “barren” with a word rooted in bereavement: it is not simply empty, but unable to bring forth what should live.
THE MEANING
A place can look pleasant while its source remains harmful: the water is bad, and the ground cannot bear life. The word translated “barren” carries the force of bereavement, naming the loss of what ought to emerge. The verse holds appearance and source in the same view.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that a pleasant surface proves the source beneath it is life-giving.
THE ROOT
מְשַׁכֶּלֶת
meshakkelet
GROWS FROM
שכל
To bereave, deprive of offspring, or make childless.
The Hebrew word describes the ground as bereaving: what should come forth is lost. “Barren” therefore carries the deeper sense of a land that withholds life, not merely one that looks empty.
ALSO GROWS
shikkēl: To bereave or make childless.
שִׁכֵּל
This verb shows the active force inside the description of the ground: its barrenness is tied to loss.
shakhul: Bereaved or childless.
שָׁכוּל
The same root names the condition of having lost offspring, giving the land’s failure the weight of a lost future.
THE PATTERN
Life depends on its source: where water fails, fruitfulness fails; where water flows, life can return.
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings.He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.THE THREAD
And he went forth unto the spring of the waters, and cast the salt in there, and said, Thus saith the LORD, I have healed these waters; there shall not be from thence any more death or barren land.The same Hebrew word for “barren” appears here and in the next verse. The thread makes the harm concrete: when the waters are healed, the ground no longer bereaves the city of what should grow.
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