What Does Ezekiel 32:8 Mean in the King James?
All the bright lights of heaven will I make dark over thee, and set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord GOD.
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
Hebrew’s verb for darkening also means mourning: the darkened sky is already a sky in grief.
THE MEANING
This verse addresses you with a scene in which even the lights overhead are darkened and darkness is laid across the land. The Hebrew verb for darkening also carries mourning, joining the ruined sky to grief. The LORD GOD names this as his own act of judgment.
THE ROOT
אַקְדִּירֵם
ʾaqdîrēm
GROWS FROM
קדר
To grow dark or to mourn.
The verb translated “make dark” grows from a root that also means “mourn.” The darkness here carries grief within it: the heavens themselves become a scene of mourning.
ALSO GROWS
qādar: To grow dark; to mourn.
קָדַר
One verb holds physical darkening and grief together, so the sky’s loss of light carries the force of mourning.
qadrut: Blackness, gloom.
קַדְרוּת
Isaiah uses this noun for the heavens’ blackness, revealing the same root beneath Ezekiel’s darkening.
מְאֹרֵי אוֹר
meʾorê ʾôr
GROWS FROM
אור
Light; to shine.
“bright lights” in this verse is meʾorê ʾôr. The Hebrew phrase is “luminaries of light”: it names both the light and its bearers. The verse darkens the very sources that make the heavens bright.
ALSO GROWS
ʾôr: Light.
אוֹר
The light itself is named within the phrase, making its disappearance central to the verse.
māʾôr: A luminary, a bearer of light.
מָאוֹר
These are the heavenly sources of light that the verse says are darkened.
THE PATTERN
In judgment, the heavens themselves lose their light over the land.
And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord GOD, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day:The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining:Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:THE THREAD
I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering.Ezekiel’s “darken” and Isaiah’s “blackness” grow from קדר, the root that also means to mourn. Isaiah clothes the heavens in sackcloth, making visible the grief carried within Ezekiel’s darkening.
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