What Does Jeremiah 52:27 Mean in the King James?
And the king of Babylon smote them, and put them to death in Riblah in the land of Hamath. Thus Judah was carried away captive out of his own 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 conquest’s two violences together: bodies are killed, then a whole people are removed from their land.
THE MEANING
This sentence keeps the bodily cost of conquest joined to the loss of home: people die at Riblah, and Judah is carried from its own land. Exile here is collective dispossession, not a neutral change of place.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this undoes is that exile can be described as relocation without the violence that produces it. The verse binds the deaths and the dispossession together.
THE ROOT
וַיִּגֶל
wayyigel
GROWS FROM
גלה
To uncover or lay bare; in this form, to go into exile.
“carried away captive” in this verse is wayyigel. The verb for Judah’s exile comes from גלה (galah), a root that also means “uncover” or “lay bare.” That shared seed lets the word carry an added shade of exposure: a people are displaced from their land and left vulnerable.
ALSO GROWS
galah: Uncover, expose, reveal
גָּלָה
This branch brings the sense of being laid bare into the verse’s account of exile.
golah: Exile; the exiles
גּוֹלָה
This noun names both the condition of displacement and the people who live through it.
THE PATTERN
When a people are overcome, violence reaches beyond individual deaths to collective displacement.
And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone.And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.THE THREAD
And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.Jeremiah’s verb for Judah’s exile comes from גלה (galah), “to uncover” or “lay bare,” the same root used here for Noah being uncovered. That shared root lets exposure sound beneath the account of Judah’s displacement.
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