What Does Amos 8:13 Mean?
In that day the fair virgins and the young men shall faint with thirst.
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
In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst.THE KEY
Even the most vigorous faint when thirst exposes their dependence on what sustains life.
THE MEANING
Beauty and strength do not make a person self-sustaining; thirst reveals the limit of both. The surrounding words name a famine of hearing the LORD’s words, and this verse makes that deprivation felt in the body too. The verse speaks now wherever outward vitality cannot fill what is lacking.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that youth, beauty, or strength can make someone self-sustaining.
THE ROOT
צָמָא
tsamaʾ
GROWS FROM
צמא
ṣ-m-ʾ
To thirst; thirst, the bodily need for water.
The verse sets thirst against the beauty and vigor of youth: those who look most alive still depend on what they cannot supply themselves. The same root names the thirsty one and drought, holding bodily need and the condition that intensifies it together; the surrounding famine of hearing the LORD’s words echoes that deprivation.
ALSO GROWS
tsameʾ: Thirsty
צָמֵא
The thirsty person makes visible the need that the verse says even the young cannot escape.
tsimmaʾon: Drought; severe thirst
צִמָּאוֹן
This branch carries thirst from an individual sensation to a condition of widespread lack.
בַּחוּרִים
baḥurim
GROWS FROM
בחר
b-ḥ-r
To choose or select; the word for young men is associated with the choice or prime ones.
The word for young men belongs to the same word family as choosing and the choice one. Even those described as being in their prime faint when thirst overtakes them; being at one’s best does not remove dependence.
ALSO GROWS
baḥar: To choose; select
בָּחַר
It gives the young men’s designation an echo of being chosen or selected.
baḥir: Chosen one; choice one
בָּחִיר
This related form sharpens the verse’s point: even the choice ones are vulnerable to thirst.
THE PATTERN
Thirst makes dependence visible and directs the living toward what can sustain them.
My living soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before the face of God?Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters, and whoever has no silver, come, break open and eat. Yes, come, break open wine and milk, without silver and without price.On the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.THE THREAD
Behold, the days come, declares the Lord GOD, that I will send a hunger into the land, not a hunger for bread, nor a thirst for waters, but a hunger to hear and respond to the words of the LORD.The same Hebrew root, צמא (tsamaʾ, thirst), appears in both verses. Amos 8:11 names a famine of hearing the LORD’s words; in 8:13, thirst makes that deprivation tangible in the body.
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