What Does John 5:2 Mean in the King James?
Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.
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
Before any condition is named, the verse gives you a pool whose Greek name evokes plunging, five shelters around it, and a place-name often read as “house of kindness”, a healing landscape inside the city of wholeness.
THE MEANING
You stand at a threshold where water can be entered and shelter surrounds it. Even before healing is named, the place-name may carry kindness, while Jerusalem carries wholeness in the background.
THE ROOT
κολυμβήθρα
kolymbēthra
GROWS FROM
κολυμβ
To swim, dive, or plunge into water.
The Greek word for pool is connected to a verb for swimming or plunging: this is water understood as a place one enters, not merely a still basin. Five porches shelter the place of immersion, making the scene a threshold where bodies gather.
ALSO GROWS
kolymbaō: To swim or dive.
κολυμβάω
This verb gives the pool its sense of water as something entered.
kolymbētēs: A swimmer.
κολυμβητής
The same word family names the person who enters the water, keeping the pool connected to embodied movement.
בית חסדא
Beth Ḥesda
GROWS FROM
ח־ס־ד
Kindness, faithful love, or covenant loyalty.
Bethesda is often connected with Aramaic beth ḥesda, “house of kindness” or “house of mercy,” though the name’s derivation is uncertain. If that reading is heard, the pool’s name gives its setting a nature of kindness, not just a location.
ALSO GROWS
ḥesed: Faithful love, steadfast kindness.
חֶסֶד
This is the root often proposed for Bethesda’s second element, giving the place-name the shade of a house marked by kindness.
ḥasid: A devoted or faithful one.
חָסִיד
The same consonants describe a person characterized by devotion, suggesting kindness as a lived nature if the name’s proposed root is right.
יְרוּשָׁלַיִם
Yerushalayim
GROWS FROM
שלם
Wholeness or completeness.
“Jerusalem” in this verse is Yerushalayim. The name carries the sound and sense of shalom, wholeness, placing this pool within a city whose name evokes completeness. Its -ayim ending echoes Mitzrayim’s dual form, framing the larger movement from constriction toward wholeness.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness, well-being.
שָׁלוֹם
The city’s name carries this wholeness in the background of the scene.
shalem: Whole or complete.
שָׁלֵם
This branch makes Jerusalem’s name resonate with the completeness toward which the larger biblical arc moves.
THE PATTERN
Waters mark thresholds where what is damaged can be changed toward life and restored sight.
And he cried unto the LORD; and the LORD shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet: there he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he proved them,And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh.And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.THE THREAD
And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.The same Greek word, κολυμβήθρα, names the pool where the blind man washes and sees. That pool is called Siloam, “Sent,” joining entered water with the arrival of restored sight.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
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