What Does Lamentations 2:9 Mean in the King James?
Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.
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 broken gates are only the outer sign: the deeper breach reaches the city’s ability to be guided at all.
THE MEANING
When the boundaries around your life give way, the loss can reach beyond safety: leadership is absent, instruction is gone, and even vision from the LORD cannot be found. The verse holds these losses together as one collapse, from the city’s gates to its capacity to perceive direction.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a breach in safety can leave guidance intact: here, fallen gates, absent rulers, vanished instruction, and missing vision arrive as one devastation.
THE ROOT
תּוֹרָה
torah
GROWS FROM
ירה
To direct or instruct; in its teaching form, to point a way.
“The law is no more” reaches beyond the loss of rules: the root carries the sense of direction and instruction. With the gates and rulers gone, the city also loses the guidance that points a way forward.
ALSO GROWS
yarah: To teach or direct.
יָרָה
This verbal form shows the directing sense beneath Torah’s instruction.
moreh: Teacher or instructor.
מוֹרֶה
The same root names the one who gives direction, making the absence of Torah an absence of instruction.
אִבֵּד
ʾibbed
GROWS FROM
אבד
To perish or be lost; in a causative form, to cause to perish or destroy.
“destroyed” in this verse is ʾibbed. The verse pairs this word with “broken”: the bars are not only fractured but made to vanish. The root’s sense of loss gives the destruction an added edge of disappearance.
ALSO GROWS
avad: To perish or be lost.
אָבַד
This is the root’s basic sense, beneath the active form rendered “destroyed.”
avaddon: Destruction or ruin.
אֲבַדּוֹן
This noun from the same root shows how the idea of being lost becomes a name for ruin itself.
חָזוֹן
ḥazon
GROWS FROM
חזה
To see or behold.
The prophets find no vision: what disappears is the capacity to see and perceive, not merely a prediction about what comes next. The loss reaches the city’s sight of direction from the LORD.
ALSO GROWS
ḥazah: To see or behold.
חָזָה
This verb exposes the act of seeing beneath the noun “vision.”
ḥozeh: A seer.
חֹזֶה
The related word names a person by the very capacity this verse says can no longer find vision.
THE PATTERN
When a community loses its sources of guidance, public order and shared direction collapse together.
Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients.Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.THE THREAD
And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.Micah names the counter-movement: instruction goes out from Zion where Lamentations says it has disappeared. The shared Hebrew word תּוֹרָה (torah, instruction) binds the verses, placing the silence of instruction alongside its renewed flow.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us