What Does Ezekiel 5:15 Mean in the King James?
So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall execute judgments in thee in anger and in fury and in furious rebukes. I the LORD have spoken it.
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 city’s devastation becomes instruction: the people around it read the judgment as a public lesson.
THE MEANING
Where a community’s consequences are visible to those around it, its condition can become both reproach and instruction. The judgment named here is severe, anger, fury, and rebuke, and the LORD’s spoken word gives it force.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a community’s consequences remain private: here, those around it see them and learn from them.
THE ROOT
מוּסָר
musar
GROWS FROM
יסר
to discipline, correct, or chastise
English instruction can sound like information, while musar (מוּסָר, discipline or correction) carries the force of correction. Here that correction becomes visible through public devastation, a severe lesson named alongside reproach and astonishment.
ALSO GROWS
yāsar: to discipline or correct
יָסַר
The verb shows the corrective force carried by the instruction in this verse.
yissurim: chastisements or afflictions
יִסּוּרִים
This related form makes clear that musar can involve painful correction, as it does here.
THE PATTERN
A community’s exposed consequences can become a public lesson to the people who witness them.
Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger?And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbour, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this great city?Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.THE THREAD
To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;The word rendered “instruction” here is musar (מוּסָר, correction or instruction), the same Hebrew word in Proverbs’ purpose statement. Proverbs places musar within wisdom; Ezekiel shows the severe form it can take when a community’s judgment becomes visible to others.
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