What Does Isaiah 5:9 Mean in the King James?
In mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.
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
A house can remain standing and still be ruined: its ruin is that no one dwells there.
THE MEANING
This verse names a living fracture: a place can be large and beautiful while emptied of the people who make it a home. The LORD’s word makes that emptiness audible, exposing how abundance can contain its own desolation.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that size, beauty, and possession are proof of fullness.
THE ROOT
לְשַׁמָּה
ləshammāh
GROWS FROM
שׁמם
To be desolate, devastated, or appalled.
The root holds ruin and stunned desolation together: what is laid waste is also something that leaves the witness appalled. English “desolate” carries the emptiness, while the Hebrew root lets you hear the shock within it.
ALSO GROWS
shamem: To be desolate or appalled.
שָׁמֵם
The same root describes both the ruined condition and the stunned response it produces.
shemamah: Desolation, waste.
שְׁמָמָה
This noun makes the condition itself visible: the house is not merely unoccupied but rendered a wasteland.
יוֹשֵׁב
yōshēv
GROWS FROM
ישׁב
To sit, remain, or dwell.
The verse does not say that the buildings disappear; it says there is no one dwelling in them. Hebrew’s inhabitant is a dweller, one who settles into a place, so the emptiness is the severing of shelter from the life it is meant to hold.
ALSO GROWS
yashav: To sit, stay, or dwell.
יָשַׁב
The inhabitant is defined by the act of remaining in the house.
moshav: A dwelling place or settlement.
מוֹשָׁב
A dwelling is a place made meaningful by someone settling there.
THE PATTERN
Accumulated structures can become empty when possession displaces the conditions of dwelling.
Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!And I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant.Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.THE THREAD
Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!Both verses repeat bayit, “house”: in verse 8 houses are joined until there is no place, and in verse 9 the houses are left without a dweller. The shared word reveals the sequence: expanding possession can erase the room a house exists to hold.
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