2 Kings 6:25
“And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver.”
King James Version (KJV)
Read this verse in context with translation switching:
Read Full Chapter →When siege starves a city, the value system inverts: the worthless becomes costly, and desperation strips away all dignity.
Context
The siege is total, and the famine is catastrophic. Ass's head (offal, normally fit only for animals) becomes a luxury, sold at outrageous price. Dove's dung (possibly a fertilizer or fuel, possibly literally feces) is bought as food. This is the nadir of human desperation.
What Does 2 Kings 6:25 Mean?
These specific details are not invented for shock value. They tell us about famine from the inside: when the supply chain breaks, when walls keep out trade, when gardens cannot grow and herds cannot be sustained, people are forced to eat what they would never have considered before. An ass's head—the skull, possibly the brains—becomes food fit to buy. And the pricing tells us the severity: eighty pieces of silver for rotted meat. Then dove's dung, a phrase some scholars think refers to locust beans or some other item, but whatever it was, it was bought as food. The specificity is heartbreaking. This is not metaphorical hunger. This is the literal reduction of human beings to such desperation that they will pay dearly for garbage.
Christ entered into this world's desperation. He knew hunger, thirst, and the vulnerability of the flesh. And He calls us to see in the faces of the hungry and the broken His own face. When we witness famine—whether literal starvation in distant lands or the spiritual hunger of those around us—we are called to see Christ. The siege in Samaria is not just political; it is spiritual. It is what sin does: it walls us off from provision, from community, from hope. Only in Christ are we opened to a different economy, where the last become first and the seemingly worthless become precious.
In the Original Language
kabod (כָּבוֹד), though not used here, underlies the concept—the weight or worth of something. Here, worth is measured in silver, and it is catastrophically inverted.
Application
When you see someone reduced to desperation—panhandling, eating from garbage, selling what they should never have to sell—you see a person in siege. Christ calls us to break the siege, to bring provision, to restore dignity. Do not look away.