What Does Ezekiel 16:56 Mean in the King James?
For thy sister Sodom was not mentioned by thy mouth in the day of thy pride,
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
Pride can hide a mirror by keeping its name out of your mouth.
THE MEANING
Your pride can keep another’s ruin out of your mouth when naming it would unsettle your sense of distance from it. Sodom is the unspoken mirror: the silence around her name reveals what self-exaltation cannot comfortably admit.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
If I never name the comparison, it cannot reveal my likeness to what I condemn.
THE ROOT
לִשְׁמוּעָה
li-shemuʿah
GROWS FROM
שמע
shamaʿ
To hear, listen, or heed.
לִשְׁמוּעָה (li-shemuʿah) means a report, something heard, so the word translated “mentioned” carries hearing inside speech. Pride leaves Sodom outside the mouth, and the suppressed report becomes a measure of what the speaker cannot acknowledge.
ALSO GROWS
shamaʿ: To hear or listen.
שָׁמַע
A report begins as something heard; here the verse places that report in what the mouth says.
shemiʿah: Hearing or listening.
שְׁמִיעָה
This branch keeps hearing joined to the report that pride leaves unspoken.
THE PATTERN
Pride preserves a false distance from truths another’s condition would reveal about the self, through silence, comparison, or imagined immunity.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.THE THREAD
Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?Isaiah calls the message “our report,” using the same Hebrew root שמע (shamaʿ), hearing, that appears in Ezekiel’s word for what is mentioned. The shared root joins what is heard to what is spoken, making the silence around Sodom’s name part of the verse’s disclosure.
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