What Does Nahum 3:10 Mean in the King James?
Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity: her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets: and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains.
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 Hebrew word for exile shares its root with uncovering: conquest strips a people of shelter and leaves them exposed.
THE MEANING
This verse names conquest without disguise: a people is torn from home, children are killed in public, honored men are put at the mercy of lots, and leaders are chained. The violence reaches every age and rank, taking safety, dignity, and freedom together. Exile leaves those taken exposed and without the shelter of home.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that conquest is only a change of rulers collapses here: its cost is inflicted on children and bodies, and no rank is spared.
THE ROOT
לַגֹּלָה
la-golah
GROWS FROM
גלה
To uncover or expose; in causative forms, to deport or send into exile.
The verse’s word for exile belongs to a root that also means uncovering. The shared consonants let displacement carry a second edge: a people forced from home is made exposed, stripped of the shelter its home gave.
ALSO GROWS
galah: To uncover, reveal.
גָּלָה
This branch shares the root גלה with the word for exile, allowing exposure and forced removal to resonate in the verse.
higlah: To deport, send into exile.
הִגְלָה
This causative form makes exile an act imposed on people, matching the verse’s forced removal.
THE PATTERN
Conquest and rule turn children into targets when power treats a people as spoil.
Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.THE THREAD
And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.Nahum’s word for exile and Genesis’s word “uncovered” share the root גלה (galah), whose branches include exposure and exile. Genesis uses the root for bodily exposure; Nahum shows a people exposed through forced displacement and loss of shelter.
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