What Does Lamentations 4:6 Mean?
For the crookedness of the daughter of my people is greater than the falling short of Sodom, which has been overturned in a moment, and no hands are wrung for her.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For the punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the punishment of the sin of Sodom, that was overthrown as in a moment, and no hands stayed on her.THE KEY
The Hebrew image of Sodom being turned over makes the verse compare two forms of ruin: one arrives in a moment, while the other is greater still.
THE MEANING
The verse places two devastations before you now: Sodom’s overturning in a moment and a greater punishment borne by the daughter of this people. It keeps the suffering exposed and measures one ruin against another without making them interchangeable. The difference in scale does not soften either one.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that ruin is worst when it strikes all at once: the verse places a greater punishment beside Sodom’s overthrow in a moment.
THE ROOT
הֲפוּכָה
haphukhah
GROWS FROM
הפך
הָפַךְ (hāphakh) means to turn over, overturn, or reverse.
The verse does more than say Sodom disappears: הֲפוּכָה (haphukhah, overturned) carries an image of being turned over. That image makes the comparison concrete: Sodom’s ruin is complete in a moment, while the punishment set beside it is greater still.
ALSO GROWS
hāphakh: To turn over or overturn.
הָפַךְ
This verb names the action behind Sodom’s fate in the verse.
mahpekhah: An overthrow or upheaval.
מַהְפֵּכָה
This noun from the same consonants keeps the image of overturning visible as a kind of ruin.
חַטָּאת
ḥaṭṭāʾt
GROWS FROM
חטא
חָטָא (ḥāṭāʾ) means to miss or err, carrying the image of missing a mark.
“falling short” in this verse is ḥaṭṭāʾt. The comparison sets the daughter of the people’s עָוֹן (ʿāwōn, crookedness) beside Sodom’s חַטָּאת (ḥaṭṭāʾt, missing), so the Hebrew distinguishes a bent condition from a missed mark. It opens the verse beyond one English category of wrongdoing, even as both are held against the severity of ruin.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss or err.
חָטָא
The verb makes the root’s image of missing visible beneath the verse’s word for sin.
ḥōṭēʾ: One who misses or errs.
חוֹטֵא
This branch keeps the image attached to a person rather than leaving it as an abstract label.
THE PATTERN
One community’s ruin becomes a measure that exposes another community’s peril.
And he overturned those cities, and all the plain, and all who settled in those cities, and what sprouted from the ground.Unless the LORD of hosts had left us a few survivors, we would have been as Sodom, and we would have been like Gomorrah.And you, Capernaum, who are lifted up to heaven, will be brought down into the unseen. For if the works of strength that were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.THE THREAD
And he overturned those cities, and all the plain, and all who settled in those cities, and what sprouted from the ground.Lamentations uses הֲפוּכָה (haphukhah, overturned), from הָפַךְ (hāphakh, to overturn), the same root as Genesis’ verb for Sodom’s destruction. Genesis shows the scope carried by that image: the turning over reaches the cities, their inhabitants, and the ground.
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