What Does Jeremiah 5:30 Mean in the King James?
A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land;
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 verse holds astonishment and horror together: what has taken shape in the land is too dreadful to become ordinary.
THE MEANING
A dreadful reality has taken shape in the land you inhabit; the verse names it as both astonishing and horrible. Its wording refuses to let familiarity turn the dreadful into background.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that what has become part of a society’s landscape must be ordinary or acceptable.
THE ROOT
שַׁמָּה
shammah
GROWS FROM
שׁמם
sh-m-m
To be appalled or to become desolate.
Here “wonderful” carries astonishment at a devastating state. Its root reaches into being appalled and desolation, joining the stunned response to the condition that causes it.
ALSO GROWS
shamem: To be appalled or desolate.
שָׁמֵם
This branch shows the word’s astonishment as the response to a devastating condition.
shemamah: Desolation.
שְׁמָמָה
The same seed links what leaves a witness appalled with the desolate state that provokes that response.
נִהְיְתָה
nihyetah
GROWS FROM
היה
hayah
To be, become, or happen; to come to pass.
“is committed” in this verse is nihyetah. The verb says this horror has come to be in the land; it is not merely imagined or feared. The root of being makes the verse register a condition that now exists in public life.
ALSO GROWS
hayah: To be, become, or happen.
הָיָה
This form keeps the event tied to coming into being, not just to an abstract label.
vayehi: And it came to pass.
וַיְהִי
This narrative form makes the same root’s movement into actual occurrence audible.
THE PATTERN
Corruption remains horrifying whether it is embedded in the land, upheld by leaders, or hidden in secret.
I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness: they are all of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.I have seen an horrible thing in the house of Israel: there is the whoredom of Ephraim, Israel is defiled.For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.THE THREAD
As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men:The same root appears in “were astonied” in Isaiah: here it names the horror, while there it describes the response to a body marred beyond ordinary appearance. One root connects an appalling condition in the land to a human form that leaves its witnesses stunned.
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