What Does Judges 6:4 Mean in the King James?
And they encamped against them, and destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.
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 exposes hunger as a weapon: the invaders attack the land’s capacity to keep Israel alive.
THE MEANING
The verse shows you how violence can work through deprivation: the harvest is ruined all the way to Gaza, and Israel has no sustaining provision, down to its sheep, oxen, and donkeys. The attack strips the means that could feed and carry a people through what comes next.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a people is safe so long as no one is struck down: the food and animals that sustain daily life can be attacked as directly as bodies.
THE ROOT
מִחְיָה
michyah
GROWS FROM
חיה
To live, to be alive.
The word translated “sustenance” grows from the root for living: it means what keeps life going. The verse traces the loss from ruined harvest to the disappearance of the animals that also sustain Israel.
ALSO GROWS
chai: Living, alive.
חַי
The same root names the living state that this lost provision sustains.
chayyim: Life.
חַיִּים
This branch makes the verse’s deprivation concrete: what is taken is bound to life itself.
יְבוּל
yevul
GROWS FROM
יבל
To bring, lead, or carry; as a noun, produce or yield.
“Increase” here is the land’s yield, what it brings forth. The attack reaches Israel by ruining that source of provision, so the danger extends from the fields into the life of the people.
ALSO GROWS
hovil: To bring, lead, or carry.
הוֹבִיל
This verb carries the root’s sense of bringing something along; yevul is what the land brings forth.
yuval: A stream or watercourse.
יוּבַל
This branch carries the sense of something conveyed or flowing, alongside the yield that flows from the land.
THE PATTERN
Destruction reaches a people deeply when it strips away the sources that sustain life.
For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.Judges calls sustenance מִחְיָה (michyah), from חיה (chayah), “to live”; Deuteronomy repeats that same root in “live.” The link keeps the hunger in Judges bodily and immediate: when provision disappears, life itself is under pressure.
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