What Does Isaiah 37:25 Mean in the King James?
I have digged, and drunk water; and with the sole of my feet have I dried up all the rivers of the besieged places.
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
This boast measures conquest by whether the conqueror can make a place’s life-giving waters disappear.
THE MEANING
A voice in this verse measures dominion by access to water: it digs, drinks, then claims the power to dry whole channels. That boast treats a people’s means of survival as ground an invading force can claim and erase.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie inside the boast is that taking control of a community’s water means owning the life it sustains. Seizing a channel does not make the conqueror the source of life.
THE ROOT
וְאַחְרִיב
ve’achrîv
GROWS FROM
ח־ר־ב
ḥ-r-b
To become dry, or to dry out and lay waste.
“dried up” in this verse is ve’achrîv. This root holds the drying of a channel and the desolation of a place together: the water disappears, and the land is left waste. Its consonants also echo חֶרֶב (ḥerev, sword), bringing the sound of forceful devastation close to the image of drying.
ALSO GROWS
ḥārav: To dry out or lie desolate.
חָרַב
The same root makes dryness a condition of ruin, not merely a change in the water.
ḥorbāh: A dry waste or ruin.
חָרְבָּה
This branch shows how drying reaches beyond the river to describe what is left of a place.
מָצוֹר
māṣôr
GROWS FROM
צ־ו־ר
ṣ-w-r
To press in, bind, or besiege.
“besieged places” in this verse is māṣôr. The word for a besieged place carries the pressure of being closed in. Its consonant frame echoes מִצְרַיִם (Mitzrayim, “the two narrows”), where constriction becomes a place, and here, the water within that narrowing is what the conqueror boasts of drying.
ALSO GROWS
ṣūr: To bind in or besiege.
צוּר
This verbal branch gives the noun its enclosing force: siege is pressure closing around a place.
māṣôr: A siege or besieged enclosure.
מָצוֹר
The verse names the rivers as belonging to places already defined by constriction.
THE PATTERN
Changing the course or supply of water changes the paths and survival available to a people.
And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.THE THREAD
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.Isaiah uses the same ח־ר־ב (ḥ-r-b) root for the river being dried up, joining the loss of water with the laying waste of a place. Here, that same desolation appears as a conqueror’s boast: he claims the power to turn a sustaining flow into ruin.
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