What Does Ezekiel 14:21 Mean?
For thus says the Lord GOD, How much more when I send my four harmful judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the hunger, and the beast of harm, and the plague, to cut off from it man and beast?
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 thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?THE KEY
The violence is not one disaster but four distinct routes to one outcome: lives cut off together.
THE MEANING
The verse places you before a total picture: sword, famine, wild animals, and pestilence each become a path toward lives being cut off. People and animals are named together, so the devastation reaches across the shared field of life.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that belonging to God’s city means immunity: Jerusalem is named as the place reached by all four judgments.
THE ROOT
לְהַכְרִית
lehakrit
GROWS FROM
כרת
cut; sever
“cut off” in this verse is lehakrit. The verse’s outcome is expressed as cutting life away. The same root can describe cutting a covenant, so its branches hold both binding and severing: here, the force is starkly severance.
ALSO GROWS
karat berit: cut a covenant
כָּרַת בְּרִית
The same verb of cutting can describe entering a covenant, showing how concretely this root names a bond being made or broken.
keritut: a cutting off; divorce
כְּרִיתוּת
This branch names separation as severance, echoing the verse’s image of lives cut away from the city.
שָׁלַחְתִּי
shalachti
GROWS FROM
שלח
send forth; dispatch
“send” in this verse is shalachti. The verb names something sent outward from its source; it does not soften what is sent. Here the dispatched forces are four lethal judgments, each moving toward Jerusalem.
ALSO GROWS
shaliach: a sent one; messenger
שָׁלִיחַ
A messenger carries what is sent; here, the verb marks the judgments as forces dispatched toward their destination.
shilluach: sending away; release
שִׁלּוּחַ
This branch carries the sense of sending something out or letting it go, while the verse names the devastating force being sent.
חַיָּה
chayyah
GROWS FROM
חיה
live; be alive
“beast of harm” in this verse is chayyah. The word translated “beast” is formed from the root for living. With “man and beast” together, the verse names the threatened loss across human and animal life, not only the intensity of the calamities.
ALSO GROWS
chay: alive; living
חַי
This familiar branch makes the life-root within “beast” visible.
chayyim: life
חַיִּים
The root’s branch for life sharpens the force of “cut off”: what is ended is living existence.
THE PATTERN
Judgment is pictured as several forces converging on a community and reaching both human and animal life.
So I will send upon you hunger and a beast of harm, and they shall make you childless; and pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I, the LORD, have spoken it.I will also send the wild beasts among you, which shall strip you of your children, and cut off your cattle, and make you few in number; and your paths shall be emptied.And I see, and look, a grass-green horse, and the name of the one seated upon it is Death, and Hades follows with him. And power is given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
And God said, "Let the earth bring out living soul after its kind, cattle, creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind." And it was so.Ezekiel’s word for “beast,” חַיָּה (chayyah, living creature), shares the root חיה (chayah, to live) with Genesis’s “living creature.” The echo shows the reach of “man and beast” here: the judgment touches the life creation names as living.
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