What Does Deuteronomy 32:33 Mean?
Their wine is the burning of dragons, and the cruel poison of asps.
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
Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps.THE KEY
The verse calls poison a burning force, using a Hebrew word whose range also includes heat and fury.
THE MEANING
The verse names an intoxicating source whose wine is venom and whose force is cruel. It speaks now of harm carried inward: what is taken in can hold the burning force of a serpent’s poison.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The assumption that something called wine must nourish or be harmless is undone here: this wine is named as venom.
THE ROOT
חֲמַת
ḥămaṯ
GROWS FROM
יחם
y-ḥ-m
Become hot; heat up.
The form is the construct of a Hebrew noun whose range includes heat, fury, and venom. Its tie to the verb meaning “become hot” makes the poison carry an image of burning force that the English word alone does not show.
ALSO GROWS
ḥēmāh: A noun that can name heat or wrath, and also venom.
חֵמָה
This is the related noun form behind the verse’s word for poison, keeping heat and fury inside the venom image.
yāḥam: A verb for becoming hot.
יָחַם
It anchors the burning force carried by the verse’s image of poison.
THE PATTERN
Serpent-venom imagery exposes harmful influence whether it arrives as drink or issues from human speech.
Their burning is like the burning of a serpent, like the deaf adder that stops up its ear.At its afterward it bites like a serpent, and like an adder it spreads itself out.But the tongue no one is able to tame; it is an evil that will not stand still, full of death-bearing venom.THE THREAD
Their burning is like the burning of a serpent, like the deaf adder that stops up its ear.Psalm 58:4 uses the same Hebrew noun for poison that appears in this verse, repeating it for the serpent’s venom. That shared root lets the image of burning fury in Deuteronomy open into the poison of speech in the Psalm.
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