What Does Hosea 6:8 Mean in the King James?
Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with blood.
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 blood is not just in the city; it is the trail by which the city is known.
THE MEANING
Gilead is a city whose people make wrongdoing their work, and whose streets bear the track of blood. Violence marks the place that produces it; it does not remain only in the moment when it is done.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that bloodshed disappears when the moment has passed: it leaves a mark on the community that practices it.
THE ROOT
עֲקֻבָּה
ʿăqubbāh
GROWS FROM
עקב
ʿ-q-b
Heel; to follow at the heel, track, or supplant.
“polluted” in this verse is ʿăqubbāh. Here, עֲקֻבָּה (ʿăqubbāh) carries the sense of being tracked or stained, from the root עקב (ʿ-q-b), heel and following. The image lets the blood appear as a trace left across the city by its deeds.
ALSO GROWS
ʿaqēb: Heel.
עָקֵב
The heel is the root’s concrete image; the city’s blood is pictured as a track left in its wake.
ʿāqab: To follow at the heel or supplant.
עָקַב
The sense of following close behind illuminates how the bloodshed follows the city’s wrongdoing as its mark.
Yaʿaqov: Jacob, whose name is linked in Genesis to grasping the heel.
יַעֲקֹב
The name preserves the same heel-image, showing how this root’s concrete picture can extend into the language of pursuit and taking another’s place.
THE PATTERN
Bloodshed leaves a mark that bears witness against the place and people who commit it.
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.THE THREAD
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.Both verses use the Hebrew word דָּם (dam, blood), inflected in each passage. Genesis makes the trace in Hosea audible: blood left on a place bears witness from the ground.
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