What Does Deuteronomy 32:32 Mean?
For their vine is from the vine of Sodom, and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters are bitter.
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
For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah: their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter:THE KEY
A vine can be heavy with fruit and still feed you poison.
THE MEANING
This verse names what is taking shape in a life: abundance can carry poison, and what grows can expose its source. The grapes and clusters are full, yet their taste is gall and bitterness.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Fruitfulness does not prove that a source is life-giving; abundance can conceal what is poisonous.
THE ROOT
רֹאשׁ
rōsh
GROWS FROM
ר־א־שׁ
r-ʾ-sh
רֹאשׁ (rōsh) means a poisonous plant in this verse. The same written form also means “head,” though the relationship between those senses is uncertain.
“poison” in this verse is rōsh. The Hebrew word translated “gall” appears again in Deuteronomy 29:18, where a root bears gall and wormwood. The image reaches beneath the bitter fruit to the poisonous growth that produces it.
ALSO GROWS
rōsh: A poisonous plant, rendered “gall.”
רֹאשׁ
The same word links this vine’s bitter grapes to a root that bears poison.
rōsh: A poisonous plant, rendered “hemlock.”
רֹאשׁ
There too, poison grows like a crop in a field, echoing the verse’s bitter harvest.
מְרֹרֹת
merorot
GROWS FROM
מרר
m-r-r
To be bitter; to have a bitter taste.
The clusters are not merely described as unpleasant: their bitterness is the taste of what this vine produces. The same root names bitter herbs and the bitter waters of Marah, carrying bitterness across food, water, and fruit.
ALSO GROWS
merorim: Bitter herbs (Exodus 12:8).
מְרֹרִים
The root names bitterness as a taste carried in what is eaten.
Marah: Bitter; the name given to waters because they were bitter (Exodus 15:23).
מָרָה
The place name carries the taste of its waters, just as this verse’s clusters carry the bitterness of their source.
THE PATTERN
What a source is determines the fruit it yields, and the fruit discloses the source.
Lest there be among you a man or a woman, a family or a tribe, whose heart turns away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations. Lest there be among you a root bearing poison and wormwood.And he dug around it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with the red vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and hollowed out a winepress within it. And he waited for it to bring forth grapes, and it brought forth stinking grapes.So every good tree makes good fruit, but the rotten tree makes evil fruit.THE THREAD
Lest there be among you a man or a woman, a family or a tribe, whose heart turns away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations. Lest there be among you a root bearing poison and wormwood.The “gall” in both verses is רֹאשׁ (rōsh), a poisonous plant. Deuteronomy 29:18 names the root bearing it; this verse shows the poison ripened into grapes and bitter clusters.
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