What Does Isaiah 14:10 Mean in the King James?
All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us?
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 dead strip the fallen ruler of his grandeur and name him through the weakness he shares with them.
THE MEANING
The verse confronts you now with the dead speaking to the fallen ruler as one of their own: he is weak as they are, like them. Rank cannot lift a person beyond frailty or the shared limit of death. Their question cuts straight through the stature he once carried.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that power can make someone exempt from bodily frailty or death.
THE ROOT
חָלִיתָ
chalita
GROWS FROM
חלה
To be weak or sick; to suffer illness.
The word translated “weak” comes from a root that also names sickness, so the verse’s humiliation is embodied frailty, not merely a fall in status. Elsewhere the same root names illness as grief, holding physical affliction and felt suffering within one word-family.
ALSO GROWS
choli: Sickness, illness; also grief or suffering.
חֳלִי
Isaiah 53:4 uses this word for the griefs carried, showing the root’s reach from weakness into suffering.
machalah: Disease or sickness.
מַחֲלָה
This noun from the same root makes clear that the weakness named here belongs to the language of bodily illness.
THE PATTERN
Death strips rank of its immunity, placing the powerful in the same mortal condition as everyone else.
But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:THE THREAD
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.In Hebrew, Isaiah 53:4 uses חֳלִי (choli), “sickness” or “suffering,” from the same חלה (chalah) root as “weak” here. That shared root holds bodily illness and suffering together, opening “weak” as more than a fall in rank: it is a condition of the suffering body.
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