What Does Lamentations 4:9 Mean in the King James?
They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.
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 calls the starving “pierced through,” revealing hunger as a wound that keeps draining the body.
THE MEANING
The verse names two deaths plainly and says starvation is the more terrible: the sword’s blow is over, while those without food are pierced by want and waste away. The body does not simply become thin; its strength keeps draining because the field yields nothing. Starvation is prolonged violence, not a harmless absence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that hunger is only discomfort or emptiness breaks here: want can pierce, exhaust, and kill.
THE ROOT
מְדֻקָּרִים
mədūqqārîm
GROWS FROM
דקר
דקר (dāqar) means to pierce or stab through.
“stricken through” in this verse is mədūqqārîm. The verse first contrasts those killed by the sword with those killed by hunger, then calls the hungry victims “pierced through.” This verb makes famine bodily violence: the body without food is pierced as surely as the body struck by a blade.
ALSO GROWS
dāqar: To pierce or stab.
דָּקַר
This verb names the concrete action beneath the verse’s description of the starving as pierced.
dāqārû: They pierced.
דָּקָרוּ
This form appears in Zechariah 12:10; here the passive form names bodies that suffer the force of piercing.
יָזוּבוּ
yāzûvû
GROWS FROM
זוב
זוב (zûv) means to flow, stream, or issue; יָזוּבוּ (yāzûvû) means “they flow” or “they issue.”
The word translated “pine away” pictures something flowing out rather than simply becoming thin. The root also names a bodily flow, giving hunger the shape of a loss that keeps running out of the body.
ALSO GROWS
zāv: Flowing; a person with a bodily discharge.
זָב
This is a participle from the hollow root זוב, with the root’s ו realized in the vowel; it applies the image of flow to a person.
zōvô: His flow or discharge.
זֹבוֹ
This form in Leviticus 15:2 names a bodily issue, making the verse’s image of what flows out especially concrete.
רָעָב
rāʿāv
GROWS FROM
רעב
רעב (rāʿav) means hunger or famine.
The same root names famine and the hungry person, joining the shortage outside the body to the condition inside it. Hunger is not an abstraction here; it takes hold of the person and consumes them.
ALSO GROWS
rāʿēv: Hungry.
רָעֵב
The adjective describes the person undergoing the very lack that the noun names.
rəʿēvîm: Hungry people.
רְעֵבִים
The plural turns hunger into a condition shared by a group, as in the verse’s “they that be slain with hunger.”
THE PATTERN
When nourishment is absent, hunger acts upon the body as a force that drains and pierces it.
Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!THE THREAD
And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.The pierced-through word in this verse and Zechariah’s “pierced” come from the same Hebrew root, דקר (dāqar, to pierce). That shared root makes the hunger victims’ suffering bodily and concrete, while the verses describe different wounds.
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