What Does Jeremiah 22:26 Mean in the King James?
And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die.
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 same Hebrew root names both the mother who bore you and the land where you were not born, making exile a rupture between birth and belonging.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks in a direct threat: you and your mother are carried into another country, where neither your birth nor your bond with her prevents your death. Its language makes exile bodily and final.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that birthplace or family bond guarantees safety: the one who bore you can be forced away with you, and both can die there.
THE ROOT
יָלַד
yalad
GROWS FROM
ילד
To give birth, beget, or bring forth.
“bare / were born” in this verse is yalad. The same three consonants describe your mother giving birth and your being born somewhere. The verse sets that shared root beside a foreign land, making the threat a severing of the bond between birth and belonging.
ALSO GROWS
yeladatekha: who bore you
יְלָדַתְךָ
The verse uses the active form for your mother’s act of bringing you forth.
yulladtem: you were born
יֻלַּדְתֶּם
The same root appears in the passive form to name the land that was not your birthplace.
THE PATTERN
Exile turns distance from home into vulnerability, whether the displaced are threatened, enslaved, or scattered.
The LORD shall bring thee, and thy king which thou shalt set over thee, unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have known; and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone.Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I will not shew you favour.And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and entreat them evil four hundred years.THE THREAD
And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her.Jeremiah links the one who bore you with the place where you were not born through ילד (yalad, to bear or be born). Psalm 87 presents Zion as a place where people are born, turning land from the site of dislocation into a source of belonging.
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