What Does Lamentations 3:14 Mean in the King James?
I was a derision to all my people; and their song all the day.
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 cruelty is not only that they laugh at the speaker, but that they turn him into a song they keep performing.
THE MEANING
You can be made the object of other people’s laughter, your pain turned into their song and repeated through the day. The verse names that humiliation as an ongoing public condition, not a passing joke.
THE ROOT
שְׂחֹק
śeḥōq
GROWS FROM
שחק
ś-ḥ-q
To laugh or play; the same laughter can become mockery.
“derision” in this verse is śeḥōq. The root gathers laughter, play, and ridicule into one word-family. Here the laughter is not light amusement: it makes the speaker an object of contempt.
ALSO GROWS
śāḥaq: To laugh, play, or mock.
שָׂחַק
The verb shows the action behind the speaker’s state as a derision: people laugh at him.
miśḥāq: Play, game, or amusement.
מִשְׂחָק
This branch exposes the cruelty in treating a person’s suffering as something to play with.
נְגִינָתָם
nəgīnatām
GROWS FROM
נגן
n-g-n
To play music, especially on a stringed instrument.
The word for their song carries the sense of played music. Their ridicule has become a performance, and “all the day” makes it a refrain rather than a single insult.
ALSO GROWS
nəgīnāh: Music or song.
נְגִינָה
This is the noun-family behind “their song,” showing that the mockery takes musical form.
mənaggēn: A musician, one who plays an instrument.
מְנַגֵּן
The musician branch brings out the performed quality of a taunt repeated before an audience.
THE PATTERN
Public contempt can turn a suffering person into a repeated spectacle.
And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword.They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God.THE THREAD
But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.The word translated “have me in derision” comes from the same שחק (ś-ḥ-q) root as “derision” here, whose range includes laughing and playing. Lamentations shows what that laughter becomes when it is made into a song repeated all day.
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