What Does Jeremiah 37:16 Mean in the King James?
When Jeremiah was entered into the dungeon, and into the cabins, and Jeremiah had remained there many days;
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 word translated “remained” is the language of sitting and dwelling: captivity stretches until the pit is where Jeremiah is made to stay.
THE MEANING
When you are held in a place that feels like a pit, time can stretch into many days, and that place can feel like where you dwell. The verse names the enclosure and its duration without making the confinement disappear.
THE ROOT
וַיֵּשֶׁב
wayyeshev
GROWS FROM
י-ש-ב
To sit, dwell, settle, or remain.
The Hebrew behind “remained” says that Jeremiah sat or dwelt there; the English can make it sound as though time merely passed. The root makes the many days spatial: he is made to occupy that place.
ALSO GROWS
yōshēv: One who sits or dwells; an inhabitant.
יֹשֵׁב
The same root describes a person by the place they inhabit, echoing Jeremiah’s enforced stay.
mōshāv: A seat, dwelling, or settlement.
מוֹשָׁב
This branch makes the root’s link between sitting and dwelling visible: remaining is also occupying a place.
חֲנֻיּוֹת
ḥannuyōt
GROWS FROM
ח-נ-ה
To encamp, halt, or lodge.
The word translated “cabins” belongs to the root family of encamping and stopping. That echo gives the cells the sense of places where someone is stationed: Jeremiah is lodged within confinement, not merely dropped into an unnamed hole.
ALSO GROWS
ḥānāh: To encamp or halt.
חָנָה
The verb’s sense of stopping illuminates the cells as a place where Jeremiah is kept.
maḥaneh: A camp.
מַחֲנֶה
This related noun names a place of encampment, echoing the idea of being stationed in a confined place.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives confinement a concrete place and boundary, a pit, a prison, or bodies fixed in stocks.
And Joseph’s master took him, and put him into the prison, a place where the king’s prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison.Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.Who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks.THE THREAD
Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound in affliction and iron;Jeremiah’s “remained” translates יָשַׁב (yashav), the verb of sitting and dwelling; Psalm 107 uses the same root in “sit in darkness.” The shared verb links the many days in the pit with captivity as a place someone is made to inhabit.
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