What Does Jeremiah 50:22 Mean in the King James?

A sound of battle is in the land, and of great destruction.

Jeremiah 50:22 · KJV

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 names battle’s devastation as a shever, a breaking, so the sound of war and the fracture of the land belong to one event.

THE MEANING

Conflict fills the shared ground with sound and leaves it fractured. The verse holds battle and its great breaking together: the destruction is already audible.

THE ROOT

שֶׁבֶר

shever

GROWS FROM

שׁבר

sh-b-r

to break, shatter, or fracture

Shever is a breaking or fracture, making the verse’s destruction concrete rather than abstract. The same root names breakers, the waves that break over the water, so ruin carries the force of something crashing and breaking.

ALSO GROWS

shavar: to break or shatter

שָׁבַר

The verb makes clear that shever is the result or state of breaking.

mishbar: breaker, breaking wave

מִשְׁבָּר

The same root names the wave by its breaking force, giving the verse’s destruction the feel of a rupture crashing across the land.

THE PATTERN

Violence becomes public through its sound and the breaking it carries into the shared world.

My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.

Jeremiah 4:19 · KJVThe alarm of war is heard within the speaker as well as across the land, making conflict an audible rupture.

The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly.

Isaiah 24:19 · KJVThe repeated language of breaking and movement makes ruin physically legible rather than abstract.

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet.

Mark 13:7 · KJVWar reaches the hearer as a report before its outcome is visible, echoing Jeremiah’s battle named first as sound.

THE THREAD

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.

Psalm 46:9 · KJV

The same ⁨שבר⁩ root that names ruin here names what is broken in the psalm: the bow. The fracture falls on the instrument of war, turning the breaking away from the land and onto the weapon.

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