What Does Ezekiel 6:4 Mean in the King James?
And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.
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 word for altar carries slaughter inside it, joining ruined worship to the bodies cast down before the images.
THE MEANING
The verse places desolate altars, shattered images, and slain bodies in one scene. The dead lie before the idols themselves, and the images offer no sign of rescue or life.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie it dissolves is that whatever receives devotion has the power to preserve the devotee.
THE ROOT
מִזְבְּחוֹתֵיכֶם
mizbeḥotekhem
GROWS FROM
זבח
z-b-ḥ
to slaughter or sacrifice
“altars” in this verse is mizbeḥotekhem. The Hebrew word for altar, מִזְבֵּחַ (mizbēaḥ), grows from זבח, the root for slaughtering or sacrificing. The altar’s name carries the act associated with it, so this verse’s ruined worship and dead bodies occupy the same field of meaning.
ALSO GROWS
zāvaḥ: to slaughter or sacrifice
זָבַח
This verb carries the altar’s underlying act into view, linking the place of worship with slaughter.
zevaḥ: sacrifice
זֶבַח
This noun shares the altar’s root and makes the connection between sacrificial worship and the scene’s dead bodies harder to miss.
חֲלָלֵיכֶם
ḥălālêḵem
GROWS FROM
חלל
ḥ-l-l
to pierce or wound; also to profane or desecrate
The root’s senses include both a pierced or slain person and the act of profaning or treating something as common. That echo joins bodily death with desecration as the slain lie before the images.
ALSO GROWS
ḥālāl: a pierced or slain person
חָלָל
This is the word-family behind “your slain,” keeping the physical wound present in the verse.
ḥillēl: to profane or desecrate
חִלֵּל
The shared consonants let the scene’s human deaths echo the desecration surrounding the idols.
וְנִשְׁבְּרוּ
ve-nishberu
GROWS FROM
שבר
sh-b-r
to break, smash, or shatter
The verb presents the images as physically shattered. The same root names breakage and ruin, so the destruction is not just a change in status: the objects are broken apart.
ALSO GROWS
shāvar: to break or smash
שָׁבַר
This verb is the direct action named in the verse.
shever: breakage, fracture, or ruin
שֶׁבֶר
This noun carries the result of breaking, showing the images as ruined things rather than living powers.
THE PATTERN
A power that cannot act is exposed when the people before it fall and it cannot deliver them.
They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but themselves are gone into captivity.As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one.THE THREAD
Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils,זָבַח (zāvaḥ, “to slaughter or sacrifice”) is the root inside מִזְבֵּחַ (mizbēaḥ, “altar”) in Ezekiel. The Psalm brings the human cost of that sacrificial root into view: life itself is placed in the act.
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