What Does 2 Samuel 14:26 Mean in the King James?
And when he polled his head, (for it was at every year’s end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king’s weight.
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 word “heavy” shares a root with כָּבוֹד (kavod, “weight/glory”), and the verse then makes that weight literal by measuring the hair.
THE MEANING
Absalom’s hair grows heavy enough to be cut at each year’s end, and the verse records its weight against the king’s standard. Growth becomes weight, and weight becomes a number.
THE ROOT
כָּבֵד
kāvēd
GROWS FROM
כבד
k-b-d
To be heavy or weighty; by extension, to carry weight in honor or significance.
The hair is literally heavy, but the same root also supplies the language of weight, honor, and glory. Literal weight and weightiness remain part of one Hebrew word family, without requiring the verse to claim that the hair symbolizes glory.
ALSO GROWS
kavod: Weight, honor, or glory.
כָּבוֹד
It carries physical weight into the language of honor and glory, showing how the root extends beyond mass.
kibbēd: To honor or treat as weighty.
כִּבֵּד
It pictures honor as giving someone weight, extending the same root from physical heaviness into human regard.
וַיִּשְׁקֹל
wayyišqol
GROWS FROM
שקל
sh-q-l
To weigh or assess by weight.
“weighed” in this verse is wayyišqol. The act of weighing and the named unit of measure grow from the same root. The detail records more than abundant hair: it gives its mass against a stated standard.
ALSO GROWS
sheqel: A unit of weight, later also a coin.
שֶׁקֶל
The hair’s amount is expressed in shekels, turning the act of weighing into a countable measure.
mišqāl: Weight or a measure of weight.
מִשְׁקָל
The king’s weight names the standard used for the measurement.
THE PATTERN
Scripture lets weight name physical mass, abundance, and burdens, keeping the tangible and figurative connected.
And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.But Moses’ hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.THE THREAD
And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.The phrase translated “very rich” uses כָּבֵד (kāvēd, “heavy”), the same root attached to Absalom’s hair. In Samuel that weight is counted in shekels; in Genesis the same root carries the sense of abundance.
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