What Does Jeremiah 6:26 Mean in the King James?
O daughter of my people, gird thee with sackcloth, and wallow thyself in ashes: make thee mourning, as for an only son, most bitter lamentation: for the spoiler shall suddenly come upon us.
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 Hebrew word for “only” names the loss of someone singular and irreplaceable, giving the coming devastation the intimacy of losing a child.
THE MEANING
Your grief is given its full scale here: sackcloth, ashes, and bitter lament give sorrow a bodily, public form. The spoiler arrives suddenly upon “us,” and the image of an only son names a grief that cannot be made abstract.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that visible, unrestrained grief is excessive: here, sackcloth, ashes, and bitter lament are proportionate to the coming loss.
THE ROOT
יָחִיד
yāḥîḏ
GROWS FROM
יחד
To be one or united.
“only son” in this verse is yāḥîḏ. The word carries more than a count: it names the solitary, unique one. The grief is for someone irreplaceable, not merely for a role left empty.
ALSO GROWS
yāḥaḏ: Together, united.
יַחַד
The related word for togetherness makes the loss relational: the one who is gone belongs to a shared life.
yeḥîḏāh: A single or solitary one; the feminine form.
יְחִידָה
This branch preserves the sense of a unique, unaccompanied one that gives the grief its particular force.
הַשֹּׁדֵד
hash-shōḏēḏ
GROWS FROM
שדד
To plunder, despoil, or devastate.
The spoiler is named from the act of devastation. The threat is not only someone arriving; it is the desolation that arrives with him.
ALSO GROWS
shāḏaḏ: To plunder or devastate.
שָׁדַד
The verb shows the destructive action contained in the name of the spoiler.
shōḏ: Violence, devastation, or plunder.
שֹׁד
This related noun names the ruin itself, bringing the threat close to the loss the verse mourns.
מִסְפֵּד
mispēḏ
GROWS FROM
ספד
To lament or mourn aloud.
The word for lamentation is connected to the act of mourning aloud and to a eulogy. Grief here gives voice to the worth of the one lost; it is not an abstraction.
ALSO GROWS
sāphaḏ: To lament or mourn aloud.
סָפַד
The verb makes the lament an audible expression of loss.
mispēḏ: A lament, mourning, or eulogy.
מִסְפֵּד
This noun names the public grief the verse sets beside the image of an only son.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives grief bodily and audible form instead of reducing bereavement to an abstraction.
And Sarah died in Kirjath-arba; the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.Jesus wept.THE THREAD
And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.Zechariah uses the same Hebrew pair, מִסְפֵּד (mispēḏ, mourning) and יָחִיד (yāḥîḏ, the only one), making the echo audible beneath the English. Jeremiah’s grief reaches into the singular intimacy of losing one child; Zechariah carries that same measure into a wider shared lament.
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