What Does Lamentations 5:7 Mean?
Our fathers have missed the mark, and they are gone; we bear all their crookedness.
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
Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.THE KEY
The people who are gone can leave a weight the living still carry.
THE MEANING
You can carry the cost of wrongdoing that began before you, even after its makers are gone. The verse keeps the source of the wrong distinct from the people now bearing its weight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a wrong disappears when the person who caused it is gone.
THE ROOT
סָבַלְנוּ
sāvalnu
GROWS FROM
סבל
The root סבל (s-b-l; sābal) means to carry or bear a load.
“we bear” in this verse is sāvalnu. The verse distinguishes the fathers’ act from the living people’s burden: they sinned, and we carry. The root ties that carrying to the concrete load and its bearer, making the consequence something borne rather than an abstraction.
ALSO GROWS
sével: A burden or load
סֵבֶל
A noun from the same root; it makes tangible the weight the living carry.
sabbāl: A porter, one who carries loads
סַבָּל
An agent noun from the same root; it names the one who bears the burden.
חָטְאוּ
ḥāṭəʾû
GROWS FROM
חטא
The root חטא (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ; ḥāṭāʾ) means to miss, fail, or go wrong.
“have missed the mark” in this verse is ḥāṭəʾû. The root’s sense of missing gives “sinned” the shade of going astray or failing to reach what is right. Set beside סבל (s-b-l; carrying a load), it shows the verse’s stark movement: one generation’s missing becomes another’s burden.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōṭēʾ: One who sins or misses the mark
חוֹטֵא
This participle is formed from the same root and describes the person doing the missing.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Sin; also an offering for the missing
חַטָּאת
This noun shares the root’s consonants and links the act of missing with its named consequence and response.
THE PATTERN
A community can bear in the present the consequences of wrongdoing set in motion before it.
Guarding faithful love for thousands, carrying crookedness, rebellion, and falling short, and who by no means leaves the guilty clean, visiting the crookedness of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, to the third and to the fourth generation.And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years, and carry your harlotry, until your bodies are used up in the wilderness.So that upon you may come all the aligned blood poured out upon the earth, from the blood of the aligned Abel to the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.THE THREAD
Surely he has borne our sicknesses, and carried our wounds. Yet we reckoned him struck, beaten by God, and bowed low.The Hebrew word translated “borne” here and the word translated “borne” in Lamentations share the root סבל (s-b-l; to carry a load). Isaiah uses that same carrying language for grief and sorrow, bringing the burden in Lamentations into sharper view.
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