What Does Lamentations 4:9 Mean?
Better are the pierced by the sword than the pierced by hunger, for these are emptied and split open for want of the fruits of the field.
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
They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.THE KEY
The verse calls the starving “pierced through,” revealing hunger as a wound that keeps draining the body.
THE MEANING
The verse names two deaths plainly and says starvation is the more terrible: the sword’s blow is over, while those without food are pierced by want and waste away. The body does not simply become thin; its strength keeps draining because the field yields nothing. Starvation is prolonged violence, not a harmless absence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that hunger is only discomfort or emptiness breaks here: want can pierce, exhaust, and kill.
THE ROOT
מְדֻקָּרִים
mədūqqārîm
GROWS FROM
דקר
דקר (dāqar) means to pierce or stab through.
“stricken through” in this verse is mədūqqārîm. The verse first contrasts those killed by the sword with those killed by hunger, then calls the hungry victims “pierced through.” This verb makes famine bodily violence: the body without food is pierced as surely as the body struck by a blade.
ALSO GROWS
dāqar: To pierce or stab.
דָּקַר
This verb names the concrete action beneath the verse’s description of the starving as pierced.
dāqārû: They pierced.
דָּקָרוּ
This form appears in Zechariah 12:10; here the passive form names bodies that suffer the force of piercing.
יָזוּבוּ
yāzûvû
GROWS FROM
זוב
זוב (zûv) means to flow, stream, or issue; יָזוּבוּ (yāzûvû) means “they flow” or “they issue.”
The word translated “pine away” pictures something flowing out rather than simply becoming thin. The root also names a bodily flow, giving hunger the shape of a loss that keeps running out of the body.
ALSO GROWS
zāv: Flowing; a person with a bodily discharge.
זָב
This is a participle from the hollow root זוב, with the root’s ו realized in the vowel; it applies the image of flow to a person.
zōvô: His flow or discharge.
זֹבוֹ
This form in Leviticus 15:2 names a bodily issue, making the verse’s image of what flows out especially concrete.
רָעָב
rāʿāv
GROWS FROM
רעב
רעב (rāʿav) means hunger or famine.
The same root names famine and the hungry person, joining the shortage outside the body to the condition inside it. Hunger is not an abstraction here; it takes hold of the person and consumes them.
ALSO GROWS
rāʿēv: Hungry.
רָעֵב
The adjective describes the person undergoing the very lack that the noun names.
rəʿēvîm: Hungry people.
רְעֵבִים
The plural turns hunger into a condition shared by a group, as in the verse’s “they that be slain with hunger.”
THE PATTERN
When nourishment is absent, hunger acts upon the body as a force that drains and pierces it.
Hungry and thirsty, their living soul faints within them.And when he came back to himself, he said, "How many of my father's hired hands overflow with bread, and I perish here with hunger!"THE THREAD
And I will pour out upon the house of David, and upon those who settle in Jerusalem, the breath of favor and of pleas; and they will look upon me, the one they pierced, and they will wail for him as one wails for his only son, and will be bitter for him as one is bitter for his firstborn.The pierced-through word in this verse and Zechariah’s “pierced” come from the same Hebrew root, דקר (dāqar, to pierce). That shared root makes the hunger victims’ suffering bodily and concrete, while the verses describe different wounds.
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