What Does Isaiah 37:3 Mean in the King James?
And they said unto him, Thus saith Hezekiah, This day is a day of trouble, and of rebuke, and of blasphemy: for the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth.
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 מַשְׁבֵּר (mashber, birth-place) carries a breaking image, placing the crisis where life presses toward emergence.
THE MEANING
You stand at a threshold where what is coming has reached the opening, while the strength to bring it forth is absent. Trouble, rebuke, and contempt fill the day itself. The verse gives that collapse a precise image: labor at the breaking place.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that reaching the threshold means you must already have enough strength to complete the passage. Here the opening has arrived while the strength has not.
THE ROOT
מַשְׁבֵּר
mashber
GROWS FROM
שבר
sh-b-r
To break or shatter.
The term rendered birth is מַשְׁבֵּר (mashber, birth-place), linked to שָׁבַר (shavar, to break). The image holds the strain of a breaking place inside the labor scene, locating the crisis where passage should occur.
ALSO GROWS
shavar: To break, shatter.
שָׁבַר
This verb makes the breaking image in the birth-place visible.
shever: A fracture, break, or ruin.
שֶׁבֶר
This branch lets the birth image carry strain and rupture alongside the prospect of arrival.
לְלֵדָה
leledah
GROWS FROM
ילד
y-l-d
To bear, beget, or give birth.
“bring forth” in this verse is leledah. The phrase for bringing forth belongs to the ילד family that also yields יֶלֶד (yeled, child), linking the act of birth with the child born. The verse sets that birth-action against children already at the threshold, but without strength to carry it through.
ALSO GROWS
yalad: To bear, beget, or give birth.
יָלַד
This is the birth-action the passage says lacks strength.
yeled: A child.
יֶלֶד
This branch links the act of bringing forth to the child at the center of the image.
צָרָה
tsarah
GROWS FROM
צרר
ts-r-r
To bind, press in, or confine.
The Hebrew for trouble belongs to a family of binding and narrowness. Set beside the birth word’s breaking image, it portrays distress as pressure at the threshold where passage is needed.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow, tight; an adversary or distressing one.
צַר
This branch makes the constricted quality of the day’s trouble audible in Hebrew.
tsarar: To bind, press in, or confine.
צָרַר
This verb shows trouble as pressure that closes around the moment of birth.
THE PATTERN
Scripture uses labor imagery to name distress at the threshold where life presses toward emergence.
The sorrows of a travailing woman shall come upon him: he is an unwise son; for he should not stay long in the place of the breaking forth of children.For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.THE THREAD
The sorrows of a travailing woman shall come upon him: he is an unwise son; for he should not stay long in the place of the breaking forth of children.Hosea uses מַשְׁבֵּר (mashber, birth-place) for the place of a child’s breaking forth, the same Hebrew noun Isaiah uses for birth. The shared root makes Isaiah’s labor scene a rupture at the very point of emergence.
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