What Does Revelation 16:18 Mean?
And there are voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and there is a great shaking, such as has not been since humankind came to be upon the ground, so mighty a shaking, and so great.
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
And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.THE KEY
The verse makes upheaval total: sound, lightning, and the earth all break into motion at once.
THE MEANING
Voices, thunder, lightning, and the shaking ground arrive together, so no part of the scene remains untouched. The earthquake is named twice, and its force is measured against all human experience on earth. The verse gives the reader no familiar scale by which to contain the rupture.
THE ROOT
σεισμός
seismos
GROWS FROM
σείω
seio
To shake or move by shaking.
Greek names the event with σεισμός, from σείω: the central image is shaking itself. The same verb root describes a whole city as “moved” in Matthew 21:10, linking the earthquake with the collective stirring of a community; here, the noun is repeated to make the shaking itself the measure.
ALSO GROWS
seismos: A shaking; an earthquake.
σεισμός
The verse uses this noun twice, making shaking itself the central event and repeating its scale.
eseisthe: Was shaken; was stirred.
ἐσείσθη
The same verb root describes the whole city as “moved” in Matthew 21:10, showing how Greek uses shaking for collective disturbance as well as an earthquake.
THE PATTERN
Scripture depicts decisive upheaval as a shaking that reaches beyond one place or layer of creation.
And Mount Sinai smoked all over, because the LORD came down upon it in fire, and its smoke went up like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount trembled greatly.For thus says the LORD of hosts. Yet once more, a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry ground.And I see when he opens the sixth seal, and a great shaking comes, and the sun becomes black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon becomes as blood.THE THREAD
And when he came into Jerusalem, all the city was shaken, saying, Who is this?The city is “moved” by ἐσείσθη, from the same root σείω that gives Revelation its σεισμός, “earthquake.” The shared word lets the shaking reach from the ground itself to the collective disturbance of an entire city.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us