What Does Ezekiel 11:6 Mean in the King James?
Ye have multiplied your slain in this city, and ye have filled the streets thereof with the slain.
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 translated “slain” names the “pierced ones,” so the city is described through the bodies its violence leaves in public view.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks now wherever violence multiplies deaths and fills shared places with the people it has killed. Its cost is not abstract: the dead become visible in the streets where the community lives.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The dead can be reduced to numbers or kept out of sight; this verse places them in the city’s streets.
THE ROOT
חַלְלֵיכֶם
ḥaləlêkhem
GROWS FROM
ח־ל־ל
Pierce or wound; by extension, slay. The related root family also carries a sense of profaning or making common.
The noun translated “slain” grows from the word-family for piercing and wounding: these are the pierced ones. The related sense “profane” is a lexical echo, not the contextual definition here; it lets the word resonate with violence that violates a community’s shared life.
ALSO GROWS
ḥālal: To pierce, wound, or slay.
חָלַל
This verbal form reveals the bodily sense beneath “slain”: the city’s dead are people wounded to death.
ḥol: Common or ordinary; in related usage, profane.
חֹל
This related sense echoes how violence can violate what a community holds in common, while the verse itself uses the word for the slain.
THE PATTERN
When a community’s violence produces the dead, its cost becomes visible in the public places that community shares.
And he said unto them, Defile the house, and fill the courts with the slain: go ye forth. And they went forth, and slew in the city.Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them.And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.THE THREAD
And he said unto them, Defile the house, and fill the courts with the slain: go ye forth. And they went forth, and slew in the city.Both verses use חָלָל (ḥālāl), “one pierced or slain,” and pair the slain with a place being filled. The courts here and the streets in Ezekiel 11:6 make the dead a visible measure of the city’s violence.
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