What Does Genesis 14:11 Mean in the King James?
And they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their victuals, and went their way.
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 taking gathers a city’s acquired wealth and its food into one load, so even what sustains life becomes loot.
THE MEANING
The verse holds possessions and food together under one seizure: what a people owns and what keeps it fed can be gathered into the taker’s supply. Its starkness remains visible wherever power turns another’s necessities into portable wealth.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that stored abundance guarantees safety dissolves here: possessions and food can be stripped in the same act.
THE ROOT
רְכֻשׁ
rəḵuš
GROWS FROM
רכש
r-k-sh
To acquire or gather possessions.
The Hebrew family of “goods” carries the act of acquiring them. What one place has gathered can become, in an instant, something another power carries off.
ALSO GROWS
rāḵaš: to acquire, gain
רָכַשׁ
The verb keeps the work of acquisition inside the idea of possessions.
rəḵuš: possessions, substance
רְכֻשׁ
This is the word for the goods taken here; it also appears as “substance” in Genesis 15:14.
אָכְלָם
ʾokhlām
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
To eat or consume.
“victuals” in this verse is ʾokhlām. The Hebrew word means “their food,” from אכל, “to eat.” The line names not only loot but the seizure of what enters the mouth and sustains daily life.
ALSO GROWS
ʾākal: to eat, consume
אָכַל
The verb makes food the matter that is eaten, rather than an abstract store.
ʾōḵel: food
אֹכֶל
This noun shares the root of “their food,” keeping daily nourishment in view.
THE PATTERN
When power seizes what sustains others, their abundance becomes the taker’s supply and leaves the vulnerable exposed.
And they encamped against them, and destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.Genesis 15:14 uses the same Hebrew word, רְכֻשׁ (rəḵuš), rendered “substance,” for what people carry out with them. The shared word makes possessions visible as portable wealth, seized here, carried into freedom there.
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