What Does 2 Kings 6:25 Mean in the King James?
And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.
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 prices expose the siege: when a city is sealed, even the grotesque becomes part of the economy of survival.
THE MEANING
Here scarcity is measured against the body: an ass’s head costs fourscore pieces of silver, and a fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung costs five. The siege closes ordinary supply until even the least desirable remnants enter the market at desperate prices. The verse reveals what confinement does wherever it narrows access to life’s necessities now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a market price always expresses ordinary value: under siege, price registers the desperation created by blocked provision.
THE ROOT
צָרִים
tsarim
GROWS FROM
צָרַר
tsarar
To bind, confine, or press in; by extension, to besiege.
“besieged” in this verse is tsarim. The word makes the pressure spatial: the city is bound in from outside. The related form צַר (tsar, narrow or distressing) carries the sense of constriction, so the famine’s prices belong to a city whose ordinary flow of provision has been squeezed shut.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow, tight, or distressing.
צַר
This related form makes the siege’s constriction audible: the city’s narrowing access to food drives the prices in the verse.
tsarar: To bind, confine, or press in.
צָרַר
This is the root verb behind the besiegers’ action; the shortage is enforced by a city held in.
רָעָב
ra’av
GROWS FROM
רָעַב
r-ʿ-b
To hunger; hunger or famine.
The same word-family names both the condition and the hungry body within it. English makes famine sound like an event around people; the Hebrew keeps hunger close to the people experiencing it, which is why the verse measures the crisis in food prices.
ALSO GROWS
ra’ev: Hungry.
רָעֵב
This form names the person who bears the famine; the verse’s scarcity is bodily, not abstract.
ra’av: Hunger or famine.
רָעָב
The noun names the condition that makes even an ass’s head and dove’s dung costly.
THE PATTERN
Scarcity compresses life until provision becomes the measure of survival.
They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.THE THREAD
And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.The Hebrew word-family רָעָב (ra’av, hunger or famine) appears in both verses. Second Kings shows hunger’s prices; Isaiah traces its pressure into agitation and accusation.
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