What Does Deuteronomy 28:42 Mean?
All your trees and the fruit of your ground, the locust shall seize.
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
All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.THE KEY
The locust is cast as a new possessor, so the loss reaches the trees that bear the fruit as well as the fruit itself.
THE MEANING
This verse names a loss that reaches both the trees and the fruit they bear. The Hebrew verb translated “consume” carries the sense of taking possession, so the image includes seizure as well as eating. The land’s yield becomes subject to a destructive force.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that whatever is rooted will remain untouched is undone here: even the trees and the fruit of the land are named as vulnerable to seizure.
THE ROOT
יְיָרֵשׁ
yəyarēš
GROWS FROM
ירש
ירש (yārash) means to take possession or inherit; in causative forms, to dispossess or drive out.
“seize” in this verse is yəyarēš. The Hebrew verb יְיָרֵשׁ (yəyarēš, take possession) comes from ירש (yārash), a root that can describe inheriting land or dispossessing its former holder. The locust is pictured not only eating the yield but taking possession of the trees and fruit.
ALSO GROWS
mōrāšāh: Possession, inheritance
מוֹרָשָׁה
This noun makes the root’s sense of taking possession concrete: land and what it bears can be held as an inheritance.
hôrîš: To dispossess, drive out
הוֹרִישׁ
This causative form shows the root’s other side: one possessor’s arrival can mean another’s displacement.
פְּרִי
pərî
GROWS FROM
פרה
פרה (pārāh) means to bear fruit, be fruitful, or increase.
The noun פְּרִי (pərî, fruit) belongs to the root פרה (pārāh, bear fruit, be fruitful). The verse places the land’s visible fruitfulness beside the verb of possession: what the ground brings forth becomes subject to seizure.
ALSO GROWS
pārāh: To bear fruit, be fruitful
פָּרָה
This verb names the act of producing that lies inside the noun “fruit.”
hip̄rāh: Made fruitful, caused to bear fruit
הִפְרָה
This form shows the same root describing fruitfulness brought about in the land.
THE PATTERN
The locust’s devastation reaches from the fruit to the trees and fields that sustain its growth.
For they covered the eye of the whole land, so that it went dark. They ate all the grass of the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left, and no green remained in the trees, or in the grass of the field, through all the land of Egypt.What the shearer has left, the locust has eaten; and what the locust has left, the lapper has eaten; and what the lapper has left, the gnawer has eaten.I struck you with scorching and with yellowing. As your gardens multiplied, your vineyards, your fig trees, and your olive trees, the cutter devoured them. Yet you have not turned back to me, says the LORD.THE THREAD
And he said to him, I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to take hold of it.The same root ירש (yārash, take possession or inherit) describes land given as an inheritance here and the locust taking possession of trees and fruit in Deuteronomy 28:42. The root holds inheritance and dispossession together, revealing the verse’s loss as the reversal of land held as possession.
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