What Does Ezekiel 35:5 Mean in the King James?
Because thou hast had a perpetual hatred, and hast shed the blood of the children of Israel by the force of the sword in the time of their calamity, in the time that their iniquity had an end:
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 Hebrew word for “hatred” belongs to the same root family as “enemy,” revealing a persistent hostility that becomes bloodshed when Israel is already in calamity.
THE MEANING
This verse names hostility that persists until it becomes bloodshed at the moment someone is already in calamity. Their crookedness and their suffering stand in the same sentence, but the first does not erase the violence done to them.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that another’s wrongdoing makes violence against them cease to count, especially when they are already suffering.
THE ROOT
אֵיבָה
ʾēvāh
GROWS FROM
איב
To be an enemy; to act with hostility.
The word translated “hatred” belongs to the same root family as “enemy.” The verse names more than an inward feeling: it shows hostility taking the form of bloodshed when Israel is already in calamity.
ALSO GROWS
ʾōyēv: Enemy, adversary.
אֹיֵב
This related form names the person who embodies the hostile stance contained in אֵיבָה.
ʾāyav: To act as an enemy; to be hostile.
אָיַב
The verb makes hostility an enacted relation, fitting the verse’s move from enduring enmity to violence.
חֶרֶב
ḥerev
GROWS FROM
חרב
To dry up or become waste.
The consonants in “sword” also appear in words for drying up and desolation. This sound-family places the weapon within a field of life drained and land laid waste: the sword brings devastation, not merely force.
ALSO GROWS
ḥārav: To dry up; to become desolate.
חָרַב
It shares the root consonants ח-ר-ב with חֶרֶב, echoing the wasting effect of the violence named here.
ḥorbāh: Desolation, ruin.
חָרְבָּה
This related noun makes the sword’s consonantal echo with devastation explicit.
THE PATTERN
Hostility reveals itself most clearly in how an adversary treats someone at the moment of their collapse.
Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth:But thou shouldest not have looked on the day of thy brother in the day that he became a stranger; neither shouldest thou have rejoiced over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction; neither shouldest thou have spoken proudly in the day of distress.Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.THE THREAD
Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me: neither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause.Ezekiel’s אֵיבָה (ʾēvāh, enmity) and the Psalm’s אֹיְבַי (ʾōyĕvay, my enemies) share the root איב. The Psalm makes the same hostility visible as enemies rejoicing over another’s distress.
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