What Does Nahum 3:1 Mean?
Woe to the city of blood! All of her is lies, full of rending; the prey does not depart.
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
Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not;THE KEY
The city does not merely commit violence; it has made the tearing of people into a supply that never runs out.
THE MEANING
This verse exposes a place where violence is not an eruption but the ordinary condition: deception and plunder fill it, and the prey is never gone. It speaks wherever people remain available for someone else’s taking.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that harm is only an isolated act: a whole community can be filled with deception and organized around continual predation.
THE ROOT
פֶּרֶק
pereq
GROWS FROM
פרק
pāraq
To tear off or strip away; in context, to plunder.
“rending” in this verse is pereq. The word for “robbery” comes from a root of tearing off and stripping away; the same root can describe being wrenched free. English makes those actions look unrelated, but the root reveals a shared movement: here the city tears from its victims, while deliverance tears people from an enemy.
ALSO GROWS
pāraq: To tear off or strip away
פָּרַק
This is the physical action behind plunder: taking by tearing something away.
wayyipreqēnû: He tore us free; delivered us
וַיִּפְרְקֵנוּ
Psalm 136:24 uses this form for deliverance from enemies, showing that the root can name freedom from the very kind of power Nahum exposes.
כַּחַשׁ
kāḥaš
GROWS FROM
כחש
kāḥaš
To deny, deceive, or deal falsely.
“lies” in this verse is kāḥaš. The word carries the sense of denying or dealing falsely, so this is more than mistaken speech: what is true is being repudiated. Joined to plunder, that denial helps make taking seem ordinary and leaves the city full of violence.
ALSO GROWS
vattekaḥēš: She denied it
וַתְּכַחֵשׁ
The same root describes Sarah denying what happened, showing how falsehood can take the form of refusal to acknowledge the truth.
vaykhaḥăshû: They dealt falsely; they denied
וַיְכַחֲשׁוּ
The root can describe a collective denial, fitting Nahum’s picture of deception filling the whole city.
THE PATTERN
When a community builds itself on violence and extraction, its victims remain exposed and the harm becomes visible.
Woe to the one who builds a town with blood, and sets firm a city by crookedness!Their feet run toward harm, and they hurry to pour out clean blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of crookedness; ruin and breaking are in their paths.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
And tears us loose from those who press us, for his faithful love reaches to the ages.The word behind “robbery” is פֶּרֶק (pereq), from פרק (pāraq), “to tear off, strip away.” Psalm 136:24 uses the same root for being delivered from enemies: the root can name being plundered and being torn free from an enemy.
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