What Does Psalm 79:7 Mean in the King James?
For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place.
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 verse’s first verb turns conquest into eating: the people become what the destroyer consumes.
THE MEANING
The verse holds two losses together: a people are consumed, and the place that holds them is laid waste. The violence reaches the people and their dwelling at once; neither is hidden behind a softer word.
THE ROOT
אָכְלוּ
ʾākəlû
GROWS FROM
אכל
To eat or consume.
“devoured” in this verse is ʾākəlû. The Hebrew verb makes the violence bodily: Jacob is treated as food to be consumed. The root also names ordinary eating, so the word’s familiar sense sharpens the horror of the image.
ALSO GROWS
ʾākal: To eat.
אָכַל
The basic verb holds the verse’s image of people being consumed.
maʾăkhāl: Food; something eaten.
מַאֲכָל
This noun from the same root makes explicit the image the verb implies: the devoured become what the destroyers feed on.
הֵשַׁמּוּ
hēshammû
GROWS FROM
שמם
To be desolate or devastated; to be appalled.
“laid waste” in this verse is hēshammû. This root can describe both desolation and the stunned response to ruin. The line’s devastation empties a dwelling and leaves the destruction difficult to take in.
ALSO GROWS
shemāmāh: Desolation; a wasteland.
שְׁמָמָה
This noun names the emptied condition that the verse says has come upon Jacob’s dwelling.
shāmēm: To be desolate; to be appalled.
שָׁמֵם
The verb’s range joins the ruined place with the shock that its ruin produces.
THE PATTERN
Violence becomes communal devastation when it consumes people and leaves their sustaining place desolate.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.THE THREAD
Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD.“Eat up” uses the same Hebrew root אכל (ʾākal, eat or consume) as “devoured” in Psalm 79:7. The comparison to eating bread makes the consumption of people feel brutally ordinary.
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