What Does Haggai 1:11 Mean in the King James?
And I called for a drought upon the land, and upon the mountains, and upon the corn, and upon the new wine, and upon the oil, and upon that which the ground bringeth forth, and upon men, and upon cattle, and upon all the labour of the hands.
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 links the ground (adamah) and humanity (adam) in one word family, revealing that this drought falls on a shared life-field.
THE MEANING
The drought called by God reaches from soil and harvest into food, human beings, livestock, and the work of human hands. The verse addresses you with an unsoftened picture of deprivation spreading through the whole web that sustains life.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that deprivation stays in one compartment: here dryness reaches land, provisions, people, animals, and labor together.
THE ROOT
אֲדָמָה
adamah
GROWS FROM
אָדָם
ʾ-d-m
Ground or soil; the same consonantal family names the human.
Haggai places הָאֲדָמָה (ha’adamah, the ground) beside הָאָדָם (ha’adam, the human), words sharing the seed א-ד-ם. The pairing reveals a kinship the English words conceal: the drought reaches both the soil and the human formed from it.
ALSO GROWS
adam: human, person
אָדָם
The verse’s word for men belongs to the same family as its word for ground, so their shared exposure is audible in Hebrew.
adom: red
אָדֹם
This related form carries a color sense associated with the earth; the word family gathers human and ground around the same consonants.
חֹרֶב
chorev
GROWS FROM
חָרַב
ḥ-r-b
To dry up, become waste, or be desolate.
The drought noun belongs to a word family that holds dryness and desolation together. Its repeated reach across crops, creatures, and human labor lets the dryness carry through the whole field of life.
ALSO GROWS
charav: to dry up, become desolate
חָרַב
The verb shows the movement inside the drought: what is living and yielding becomes dry or waste.
chorbah: ruin, desolation
חָרְבָּה
This branch shows how dryness extends into devastated land, deepening the force of the drought named here.
THE PATTERN
When the ground’s provision is disrupted, the effects spread through food, creatures, bodies, and human work.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.THE THREAD
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.Haggai pairs adamah, ground, with adam, human; Genesis shows the human formed from the ground itself. The drought falling on both reaches the two forms that this shared word family already binds together.
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