What Does Jeremiah 19:4 Mean in the King James?
Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place with the blood of innocents;
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
Estrangement is not abstract here: abandoning the One they know for gods they have not known turns a place of incense into a place filled with innocent blood.
THE MEANING
This verse names a rupture that speaks now: a known relationship is abandoned for gods without lived encounter, and the place is made strange. Incense and the blood of guiltless people occupy the same place; the ritual does not soften the violence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Incense cannot make devotion faithful while innocent blood fills its place; ritual does not erase abandonment or violence.
THE ROOT
וַיְנַכְּרוּ
waynakkru
GROWS FROM
נכר
n-k-r
To recognize or treat as foreign; to make strange.
“estranged” in this verse is waynakkru. The verse says they make the place foreign. Estrangement becomes visible in the place itself, where incense to unfamiliar gods and innocent blood coexist.
ALSO GROWS
nēkār: That which is foreign or unfamiliar.
נֵכָר
It echoes the place being made strange, bringing the idea of foreignness into the verse’s description of what happens there.
nokrī: A foreign or unfamiliar person.
נָכְרִי
This branch shows the root’s link to treating someone or something as outside the familiar relationship.
יְדָעוּם
yeda'um
GROWS FROM
ידע
y-d-ʿ
To know or perceive through recognition and encounter.
“known” in this verse is yeda'um. The gods are described as unknown through the language of yada: knowing by encounter, not by information alone. That sharpens the contrast between abandoning the One they know and turning toward gods with whom they have no such relationship.
ALSO GROWS
daʿat: Knowledge or understanding.
דַּעַת
This noun carries the same root’s sense of knowing into the contrast between relationship and unfamiliarity.
mōdāʿ: An acquaintance or known person.
מֹדָע
This branch makes the relational shade of knowing clear: what is known is familiar through contact.
הַנְּקִיִּם
hanneqqiyyim
GROWS FROM
נקה
n-q-h
To be clean, clear, or free from guilt.
The word for the innocents belongs to the language of cleanness and freedom from guilt. The verse specifies whose blood fills the place: people who bear no guilt.
ALSO GROWS
naqiy: Clean, guiltless, or innocent.
נָקִי
This form makes the innocence of those whose blood is named explicit.
niqqāyōn: The state of being clean or innocent.
נִקָּיוֹן
It reinforces that the bloodshed is not an abstract wrong; it falls on the guiltless.
THE PATTERN
Worship is exposed by whether its space holds justice and protects the innocent.
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.But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.THE THREAD
For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.Both verses use עזב (ʿazab, to leave or forsake) for turning away from the known source. Jeremiah 2:13 shows that departure through broken cisterns; here, the same departure accompanies a place made foreign and filled with innocent blood.
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