What Does Nahum 2:10 Mean in the King James?
She is empty, and void, and waste: and the heart melteth, and the knees smite together, and much pain is in all loins, and the faces of them all gather blackness.
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
Nahum renders collapse as an emptying that becomes bodily: the city is vacant, and its people lose firmness from heart to knees.
THE MEANING
Here, devastation is total: the city is emptied, and fear shows in the heart, the knees, the loins, and every face. The verse leaves no intact surface, tracing ruin from public space into the body’s involuntary response.
THE ROOT
בּוּקָה
buqah
GROWS FROM
בָּקַק
To empty out, hollow, or make waste.
English gives three near-synonyms, but the Hebrew begins with forms tied to בָּקַק (baqaq, empty out): it sounds the city being emptied, hollowed, and made waste. Then the heart loses firmness; devastation is both what remains of the place and what the emptied place does to living bodies.
ALSO GROWS
baqaq: To empty out or make waste.
בָּקַק
Isaiah 24:1 uses this verb for making the earth empty and waste, showing the condition in Nahum as an emptying that has been done.
mevuqah: Emptiness or void.
מְבוּקָה
Nahum places this form beside בּוּקָה (buqah), making the emptiness sound cumulative rather than like a single loss.
נָמֵס
nāmēs
GROWS FROM
מָסַס
To melt, dissolve, or lose firmness.
“melteth” in this verse is nāmēs. The same root can describe a heart losing firmness and wax dissolving before heat. Here the inner center yields as part of the city’s ruin, so ‘melt’ holds physical dissolution and fear in one image.
ALSO GROWS
yimmās: Melted or dissolved.
יִמַּס
In Joshua 2:11 this form describes hearts melting, linking Nahum’s bodily terror to the same loss of inner firmness.
yimmassu: They melt or dissolve.
יִמַּסּוּ
Psalm 68:2 uses this form of wax melting before fire, giving the root a concrete image of something losing its shape.
THE PATTERN
Desolation becomes visible as the body’s inner firmness gives way.
Behold, the LORD maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.THE THREAD
And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.The Hebrew verb translated “melt” shares the root מָסַס (masas) with נָמֵס (nāmēs) in Nahum. Joshua names the heart’s collapse; Nahum widens that same bodily yielding to the knees, loins, and faces.
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