What Does Lamentations 5:7 Mean in the King James?
Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.
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 who are gone can leave a weight the living still carry.
THE MEANING
You can carry the cost of wrongdoing that began before you, even after its makers are gone. The verse keeps the source of the wrong distinct from the people now bearing its weight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a wrong disappears when the person who caused it is gone.
THE ROOT
סָבַלְנוּ
sāvalnu
GROWS FROM
סבל
The root סבל (s-b-l; sābal) means to carry or bear a load.
The verse distinguishes the fathers’ act from the living people’s burden: they sinned, and we carry. The root ties that carrying to the concrete load and its bearer, making the consequence something borne rather than an abstraction.
ALSO GROWS
sével: A burden or load
סֵבֶל
A noun from the same root; it makes tangible the weight the living carry.
sabbāl: A porter, one who carries loads
סַבָּל
An agent noun from the same root; it names the one who bears the burden.
חָטְאוּ
ḥāṭəʾû
GROWS FROM
חטא
The root חטא (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ; ḥāṭāʾ) means to miss, fail, or go wrong.
The root’s sense of missing gives “sinned” the shade of going astray or failing to reach what is right. Set beside סבל (s-b-l; carrying a load), it shows the verse’s stark movement: one generation’s missing becomes another’s burden.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōṭēʾ: One who sins or misses the mark
חוֹטֵא
This participle is formed from the same root and describes the person doing the missing.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Sin; also an offering for the missing
חַטָּאת
This noun shares the root’s consonants and links the act of missing with its named consequence and response.
THE PATTERN
A community can bear in the present the consequences of wrongdoing set in motion before it.
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness.That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.THE THREAD
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.The Hebrew word translated “borne” here and the word translated “borne” in Lamentations share the root סבל (s-b-l; to carry a load). Isaiah uses that same carrying language for grief and sorrow, bringing the burden in Lamentations into sharper view.
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