What Does Ezekiel 14:21 Mean in the King James?
For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?
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 violence is not one disaster but four distinct routes to one outcome: lives cut off together.
THE MEANING
The verse places you before a total picture: sword, famine, wild animals, and pestilence each become a path toward lives being cut off. People and animals are named together, so the devastation reaches across the shared field of life.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that belonging to God’s city means immunity: Jerusalem is named as the place reached by all four judgments.
THE ROOT
לְהַכְרִית
lehakrit
GROWS FROM
כרת
cut; sever
“cut off” in this verse is lehakrit. The verse’s outcome is expressed as cutting life away. The same root can describe cutting a covenant, so its branches hold both binding and severing: here, the force is starkly severance.
ALSO GROWS
karat berit: cut a covenant
כָּרַת בְּרִית
The same verb of cutting can describe entering a covenant, showing how concretely this root names a bond being made or broken.
keritut: a cutting off; divorce
כְּרִיתוּת
This branch names separation as severance, echoing the verse’s image of lives cut away from the city.
שָׁלַחְתִּי
shalachti
GROWS FROM
שלח
send forth; dispatch
“send” in this verse is shalachti. The verb names something sent outward from its source; it does not soften what is sent. Here the dispatched forces are four lethal judgments, each moving toward Jerusalem.
ALSO GROWS
shaliach: a sent one; messenger
שָׁלִיחַ
A messenger carries what is sent; here, the verb marks the judgments as forces dispatched toward their destination.
shilluach: sending away; release
שִׁלּוּחַ
This branch carries the sense of sending something out or letting it go, while the verse names the devastating force being sent.
חַיָּה
chayyah
GROWS FROM
חיה
live; be alive
The word translated “beast” is formed from the root for living. With “man and beast” together, the verse names the threatened loss across human and animal life, not only the intensity of the calamities.
ALSO GROWS
chay: alive; living
חַי
This familiar branch makes the life-root within “beast” visible.
chayyim: life
חַיִּים
The root’s branch for life sharpens the force of “cut off”: what is ended is living existence.
THE PATTERN
Judgment is pictured as several forces converging on a community and reaching both human and animal life.
So will I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee; and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon thee. I the LORD have spoken it.I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.Ezekiel’s word for “beast,” חַיָּה (chayyah, living creature), shares the root חיה (chayah, to live) with Genesis’s “living creature.” The echo shows the reach of “man and beast” here: the judgment touches the life creation names as living.
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