What Does Mark 15:33 Mean in the King James?
And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.
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
Mark uses the same “came to be” verb that names light’s arrival in Genesis, but here darkness comes to be over the whole land.
THE MEANING
Darkness covers the whole land for a span named from the sixth hour until the ninth. You meet it at full scale: nothing narrows it to one person, and “until” marks its boundary.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that darkness has no boundary: this verse names both its reach, the whole land, and its limit, until the ninth hour.
THE ROOT
ἐγένετο
egeneto
GROWS FROM
γιν-/γεν- (gin-/gen-)
To become, come into being, or happen.
Mark’s “there was darkness” uses ἐγένετο (egeneto, came to be), naming an arrival rather than a static condition. The Septuagint of Genesis 1:3 uses the same verb for “and there was light,” so English hides a creation echo: light comes to be there; darkness comes to be here.
ALSO GROWS
genesis: Origin, birth, coming into being.
γένεσις
The same word family gives us “genesis”; it makes the creation echo in darkness “came to be” easier to hear.
genos: Kind, family, lineage.
γένος
This related word carries the sense of what is born or comes from a shared origin, keeping the root’s idea of coming into being visible.
σκότος
skotos
GROWS FROM
σκότ-
skot-
Darkness, obscurity; to be dark.
English gives you the state “darkness”; the same Greek stem also forms a verb meaning “to darken,” joining the condition over the land to the action that makes a scene dark. Here the darkness has both scope, the whole land, and a duration, the hours named by the verse.
ALSO GROWS
skotia: Darkness.
σκοτία
This related noun appears in John 1:5, linking Mark’s land-wide darkness with the wider scriptural language of darkness and light.
skotizō: To darken.
σκοτίζω
This verb shows that the word family names not only darkness as a condition but also the darkening that brings it about.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives darkness a vast reach while still marking it within a named measure of time.
And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days:For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord GOD, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day:THE THREAD
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.Mark’s Greek uses ἐγένετο (egeneto, came to be), the same verb the Septuagint uses for “there was” in Genesis 1:3. That shared verb gives this darkness a creation-scale echo: the same coming-to-be that names light now names darkness across the whole land.
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