What Does Amos 5:16 Mean in the King James?
Therefore the LORD, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing.
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 Hebrew calls them “broad places”: even public spaciousness fills with grief until ordinary work joins the lament.
THE MEANING
Grief fills the public places; no street stays untouched. The farmer is called from ordinary work, while those who know lament give the sorrow its voice. Shared loss enters public life and interrupts its daily rhythms.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that ordinary work can remain outside public grief: the farmer is called into mourning beside those skilled in lament.
THE ROOT
מִסְפֵּד
misped
GROWS FROM
ספד
To mourn or lament aloud.
“wailing” in this verse is misped. The verse names a voiced, shared grief, not merely a private feeling. The same root appears in the call to mourn in Zechariah, linking this citywide lament to grief felt with intimate force.
ALSO GROWS
safad: To mourn or lament.
סָפַד
The verb makes lament an action that people give voice to.
ve-safdu: And they shall mourn.
וְסָפְדוּ
This form appears in Zechariah 12:10, where the shared root carries mourning for one deeply loved.
רְחֹבוֹת
rechovot
GROWS FROM
רחב
To be broad or spacious.
English gives “streets,” while the Hebrew word carries the sense of broad places. Here the spaces of public passage are filled with lament: grief reaches into the very places that sound open and spacious.
ALSO GROWS
rachav: Broad, wide.
רָחָב
This adjective makes the underlying sense of spaciousness in the street word visible.
merchav: A broad or open place.
מֶרְחָב
It echoes the verse’s broad public spaces, now occupied by mourning.
THE PATTERN
When grief becomes shared, it enters public view and gathers many voices around the loss.
Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Consider ye, and call for the mourning women, that they may come; and send for cunning women, that they may come:And there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him.THE THREAD
And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.Amos’s “lamentation” and Zechariah’s “mourn” share the Hebrew root ספד (safad), to lament. Zechariah’s image of mourning for an only son lets the public wailing in Amos open into grief felt with intimate intensity.
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