What Does Revelation 18:18 Mean?
And they cried out when they looked upon the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like this great city!
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 cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!THE KEY
As the city’s smoke rises, the cry “What city is like unto this great city!” turns its unmatched greatness into the measure of its ruin.
THE MEANING
You stand among witnesses watching a great city burn, hearing them cry out because nothing compares to what they see. The city’s greatness does not shield it from ruin; it makes the burning impossible to overlook.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a city’s greatness makes it secure from ruin. Here, the city called unmatched is burning before its witnesses.
THE ROOT
πυρώσεως
pyroseōs
GROWS FROM
πῦρ
pyr
Fire; the element of burning.
The word for “burning” grows from pyr, “fire,” and names the consuming fire, while “smoke” names what it sends upward. The verse holds the destruction and its visible trace together.
ALSO GROWS
pyr: Fire.
πῦρ
This is the root at the heart of the word for the city’s burning.
pyroō: Set on fire; burn.
πυρόω
The verb shows the fire as an active force consuming what it touches.
καπνόν
kapnon
GROWS FROM
καπν-
kapn-
Smoke or vapor.
The Greek word for smoke belongs to a family that also names the act of emitting smoke and the quality of being smoky. The ruin is not hidden in the fire: it rises into view as smoke, a sign witnesses can see from afar.
ALSO GROWS
kapnizō: Emit smoke; smoke.
καπνίζω
This verb joins the visible smoke to the process that produces it.
kapnōdēs: Smoky; filled with smoke.
καπνώδης
This related word makes smoke a condition that can fill what surrounds it.
πόλει
polei
GROWS FROM
πολ-
pol-
City; civic community.
The Greek word for city belongs to a family that also names citizens and civic life. The cry reaches beyond burning buildings: the whole human order gathered in the city is caught in the ruin.
ALSO GROWS
polites: Citizen.
πολίτης
The city’s people are bound into the word-family of the place they inhabit.
politeia: Citizenship; commonwealth or civic life.
πολιτεία
This branch brings the city’s shared public order into view alongside its physical destruction.
THE PATTERN
When fire consumes a place or people, its smoke makes the devastation visible to witnesses beyond the flames.
And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and saw, and look, the smoke of the land rose like the smoke of a furnace.It does not go out night or day, and its smoke rises for the ages. From generation to generation it lies dry, and no one passes through it for ages and ages.And the smoke of their torment rises into the ages of ages, and they have no rest day or night, those who bow down to the beast and his image, and whoever takes the stamp of his name.THE THREAD
And the kings of the earth, who sold themselves with her and feasted with her, shall weep and beat their breasts over her when they look upon the smoke of her burning.This verse uses the same Greek phrase, “the smoke of her burning,” as Revelation 18:18. The repeated phrase carries the city’s ruin into the sight of different witnesses, making its collapse a spectacle shared across the chapter.
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