What Does Hosea 10:10 Mean in the King James?
It is in my desire that I should chastise them; and the people shall be gathered against them, when they shall bind themselves in their two furrows.
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 uses the same root for “chastise” and “bind themselves,” so the force closing around the people and their own entanglement meet in one verb.
THE MEANING
The verse holds a people under restraint as other peoples gather against them. Its repeated binding language places the pressure closing in around them beside the bonds they themselves enter, with the image of two furrows left starkly in view.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that every binding pressure arrives from outside: the same bind-word describes the restraint on them and the bonds they enter themselves.
THE ROOT
וְאֶסְּרֵם
veʾesserēm
GROWS FROM
אסר
ʾāsar
Bind, fasten, or confine; here, the verb is rendered “chastise.”
The English gives us “chastise” first and “bind” later, yet the Hebrew returns to one verb in both places. The verse holds imposed restraint and self-entanglement inside a single image of binding.
ALSO GROWS
bəʾosrām: When they bind themselves
בְּאָסְרָם
This is the same root later in the verse, making the people’s own binding echo the restraint described earlier.
ʾāsîr: A prisoner or bound person
אָסִיר
This branch gives the verb’s binding image a human form: the one who is bound.
THE PATTERN
The bonds that close around someone can grow from the path they themselves set in motion.
His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.THE THREAD
To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron;Psalm 149:8 uses the same root אסר (ʾāsar, “bind”) for binding rulers in chains. That concrete chain image opens Hosea’s repeated verb: its “chastening” carries the weight of being bound, while the second use names the people’s own binding.
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