What Does Nahum 1:10 Mean in the King James?
For while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.
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 crowd’s cohesion is no shelter: Hebrew knots them together like thorns, then reduces them to dry material that can be consumed.
THE MEANING
The verse presents an unsparing image now: people knotted together like thorns and saturated with drink are consumed like fully dry stubble. Their cohesion and intoxication do not become shelter; the image ends in their consumption.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A tightly bound crowd is safe from being consumed.
THE ROOT
סְבֻכִים
seḇuḵim
GROWS FROM
ס־ב־ך
s-b-k
To intertwine, entangle, or grow into a thicket.
“folden together” in this verse is seḇuḵim. English gives a motion, but the root also carries the dense tangle of a thicket. The verse makes the crowd’s cohesion itself look thorny: they are not merely near the thorns; they are knotted like them.
ALSO GROWS
seḇaḵ: Thicket or tangled growth.
סְבַךְ
A thicket is the same dense interweaving pictured in the comparison to thorns.
seḇuḵim: Entangled, intertwined.
סְבֻכִים
This is the verse’s own word: the crowd is knotted together, not merely standing near thorns.
סְבוּאִים
seḇuʾim
GROWS FROM
ס־ב־א
s-b-ʾ
To drink freely or to saturation; to be drunk.
The phrase repeats forms of the same root in “their drinking” and “drunken,” making intoxication a condition of saturation. Beside the image of fully dry stubble, that fullness turns into a sharp reversal: the drink-saturated crowd ends as material with no moisture left.
ALSO GROWS
sāḇʾām: Their drinking or drunkenness.
סָבְאָם
This is the companion form in the verse, echoing the same root as “drunken.”
seḇuʾim: Drunken, saturated with drink.
סְבוּאִים
The repeated root binds the drinkers into one image of excess before the verse turns to dry stubble.
אָכְלוּ
ʾākhelū
GROWS FROM
א־כ־ל
ʾ-k-l
To eat or consume.
The verb translated “devoured” is the ordinary verb for eating. Hebrew makes destruction bodily and direct: the crowd is pictured as something consumed, like dry stubble.
ALSO GROWS
ʾākhal: To eat or consume.
אָכַל
This is the root verb behind the verse’s description of the crowd being devoured.
ʾōkhel: Food.
אֹכֶל
The related noun makes the image stark: what is devoured becomes what is eaten.
THE PATTERN
In judgment, what looks like a formidable mass can be exposed as dry fuel and consumed.
Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the LORD of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.THE THREAD
Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the LORD of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.Nahum’s אָכְלוּ (ʾākhelū, “they are consumed”) and Isaiah’s אֱכֹל (ʾĕḵōl, “to eat or devour”) share the root אָכַל (ʾākhal, “eat, consume”). Isaiah unfolds the consuming image compressed in Nahum: the judged are portrayed as dry material taken in and gone.
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