What Does Nahum 3:1 Mean in the King James?
Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not;
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 city does not merely commit violence; it has made the tearing of people into a supply that never runs out.
THE MEANING
This verse exposes a place where violence is not an eruption but the ordinary condition: deception and plunder fill it, and the prey is never gone. It speaks wherever people remain available for someone else’s taking.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that harm is only an isolated act: a whole community can be filled with deception and organized around continual predation.
THE ROOT
פֶּרֶק
pereq
GROWS FROM
פרק
pāraq
To tear off or strip away; in context, to plunder.
The word for “robbery” comes from a root of tearing off and stripping away; the same root can describe being wrenched free. English makes those actions look unrelated, but the root reveals a shared movement: here the city tears from its victims, while deliverance tears people from an enemy.
ALSO GROWS
pāraq: To tear off or strip away
פָּרַק
This is the physical action behind plunder: taking by tearing something away.
wayyipreqēnû: He tore us free; delivered us
וַיִּפְרְקֵנוּ
Psalm 136:24 uses this form for deliverance from enemies, showing that the root can name freedom from the very kind of power Nahum exposes.
כַּחַשׁ
kāḥaš
GROWS FROM
כחש
kāḥaš
To deny, deceive, or deal falsely.
“lies” in this verse is kāḥaš. The word carries the sense of denying or dealing falsely, so this is more than mistaken speech: what is true is being repudiated. Joined to plunder, that denial helps make taking seem ordinary and leaves the city full of violence.
ALSO GROWS
vattekaḥēš: She denied it
וַתְּכַחֵשׁ
The same root describes Sarah denying what happened, showing how falsehood can take the form of refusal to acknowledge the truth.
vaykhaḥăshû: They dealt falsely; they denied
וַיְכַחֲשׁוּ
The root can describe a collective denial, fitting Nahum’s picture of deception filling the whole city.
THE PATTERN
When a community builds itself on violence and extraction, its victims remain exposed and the harm becomes visible.
Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity!Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths.Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
And hath redeemed us from our enemies: for his mercy endureth for ever.The word behind “robbery” is פֶּרֶק (pereq), from פרק (pāraq), “to tear off, strip away.” Psalm 136:24 uses the same root for being delivered from enemies: the root can name being plundered and being torn free from an enemy.
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