What Does Lamentations 3:47 Mean in the King James?
Fear and a snare is come upon us, desolation and destruction.
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 pairs פַּחַד (pachad, fear) with פַּחַת (pachat, pit) by sound, then names destruction as שֶׁבֶר (shever, breaking): terror feels like entrapment, and ruin like fracture.
THE MEANING
There are moments when fear feels like a pit underfoot: dread and entrapment arrive together. The damage has the shape of ruin and breaking, and the verse names it without smoothing it over.
THE ROOT
שֶׁבֶר
shever
GROWS FROM
שבר
to break, fracture, or shatter
English can make “destruction” sound like an abstract outcome; שֶׁבֶר (shever) carries the image of something broken. The root’s other forms make the fracture visible as both an action and a condition.
ALSO GROWS
shavar: to break or shatter
שָׁבַר
This verb shows the breaking that lies inside the verse’s word for destruction.
shavur: broken or fractured
שָׁבוּר
This form presents ruin as a condition of brokenness, not merely a name for disaster.
THE PATTERN
Scripture names distress in concrete, paired images rather than reducing it to one abstract feeling.
Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;THE THREAD
Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.Lamentations names ruin with שֶׁבֶר (shever, breaking); Psalm 124 uses the same שבר root when it says the snare is broken. Here breaking names devastation; there, the broken snare opens a way out.
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