Q: I was reading this verse in the King James Version of the Bible: “Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem.” Ezekiel 4:1. What does “even” mean here? Is it an adverb?
A: In that biblical passage, “even” is an adverb meaning “namely,” “truly,” “that is to say,” or “in other words.” Here’s the verse with modern English in brackets:
“Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even [namely] Jerusalem.”
The usage is now archaic, but as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “even” was once “prefixed to a subject, object, or predicate, or to the expression of a qualifying circumstance, to emphasize its identity, or to reinforce the assertion being made about it.”
Although the phrase “the city, even Jerusalem” is used in the King James Version and “a city, even Jerusalem” in the English Standard Version, some other translations of the Bible don’t use “even” but make clear in other ways that the city mentioned is Jerusalem.
Here, for example, is the passage in the New International Version: “Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it.” And here is the passage in the New American Standard Bible: “Now you son of man, get yourself a brick, place it before you, and inscribe a city on it, Jerusalem.”
This prefixed use of “even” first showed up in Old English, with “even” spelled efne. The earliest OED citation is from an account of the life of St. Guthlac of Crowland, an Anglo-Saxon warrior who became a Christian monk and later a hermit on an island in the fens, or marshland, of Crowland in eastern England:
“He fyrngewyrht fyllan sceolde þurh deaðes cyme, domes hleotan, efne þæs ilcan þe ussa yldran fyrn frecne onfengon” (“He must accept his fate to gain glory through the coming of death, even [that is to say] the same fate our parents of old accepted”). From Guthlac B, an Old English manuscript based on Vita Sancti Guthlaci (Life of Guthlac), an 8th-century Latin work by Felix of Crowland, an East Anglian monk.
Although the OED considers this use of “even” archaic, it still shows up occasionally in modern fiction that strives for a feel of ancient times. The most recent Oxford citation, for example, is from The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), by J. R. R. Tolkien: “Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even [truly] thou shalt find it.”
If you’d like to read more, we wrote a post a few years ago about some modern uses of the word “even.”
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