What Does Exodus 15:23 Mean in the King James?
And when they came to Marah, they could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter: therefore the name of it was called Marah.
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 place takes its name from what its water makes you taste: bitterness becomes identity.
THE MEANING
You arrive where what should sustain you is present but cannot be received, and the place takes on the name of that bitter taste. The verse lets the bitterness be fully true now; it does not call undrinkable water refreshing.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the assumption that the mere presence of a source means it can nourish you.
THE ROOT
מָרִים
marim
GROWS FROM
מ־ר־ר
To be bitter or to make bitter.
The waters are bitter (מָרִים, marim, bitter), and the place is named Marah (מָרָה, Marah, bitter). The same bitterness that makes the water undrinkable becomes the place’s name: the verse makes taste into identity without pretending the water is drinkable.
ALSO GROWS
marar: To be bitter; to embitter.
מָרַר
Exodus 1:14 uses this verb for making lives bitter, showing that the root reaches from a bitter taste to an imposed condition.
merorim: Bitter herbs.
מְרֹרִים
The root also names an unmistakably bitter taste, keeping the word’s connection to what is actually experienced.
Marah: Bitter; the name of the place.
מָרָה
The place’s name compresses the taste of its waters into its identity.
THE PATTERN
Bitterness can mark a source so plainly that it names a life or a place.
And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour.And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?THE THREAD
And he cried unto the LORD; and the LORD shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet: there he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he proved them,The next verse answers the naming of Marah: the water that is undrinkable becomes sweet. Its bitterness is true in this moment, but it is not the water’s only possible condition.
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