What Does Lamentations 3:48 Mean in the King James?
Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people.
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 people’s breaking becomes visible as a river pouring through one person’s eye.
THE MEANING
When your people are broken, sorrow reaches through your body; it does not stay an idea. Your eyes pour like streams, giving grief a scale as wide as what is happening around you.
THE ROOT
שֶׁבֶר
shever
GROWS FROM
שבר
sh-b-r
To break, shatter, or fracture.
The word translated “destruction” carries the concrete sense of breaking or fracture. A related form names breakers or waves, holding the people’s breaking beside water powerful enough to surge and overwhelm.
ALSO GROWS
shavar: To break or shatter.
שָׁבַר
This verb reveals the fracture beneath the verse’s image of a people being destroyed.
mishbar: Breaker, wave.
מִשְׁבָּר
This related word links breaking with surging water, echoing the rivers of tears in the verse.
פְּלָגִים
pelagim
GROWS FROM
פלג
p-l-g
To divide or split; also a stream or channel of water.
“rivers” in this verse is pelagim. The word for these streams shares its root with dividing. The image can hold many channels of water, so the grief is not merely a single abstract flood: it runs visibly through the eye.
ALSO GROWS
palag: To divide or split.
פָּלַג
This verb brings a sense of divided courses to the streams flowing from the eye.
peleg: Stream or channel.
פֶּלֶג
This related noun makes the verse’s water a formed path of grief, not just a vast quantity.
THE PATTERN
When a people or city is wounded, grief takes visible form in tears.
Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law.Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,THE THREAD
Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law.Psalm 119:136 uses the same Hebrew phrase for streams of water running down the eyes. Here the cause is the people’s breaking; there it is their turning from instruction. Together, the verses show tears as the body’s response to what is breaking among a people.
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