What Does Ezekiel 15:4 Mean?
Look, it is given to the fire as food; the fire eats both its ends, and its midst is burned. Will it prosper in any work?
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
Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel; the fire devoureth both the ends of it, and the midst of it is burned. Is it meet for any work?THE KEY
The fire reaches the center too, leaving no hidden core of usefulness.
THE MEANING
This verse names what total consumption looks like: the fire eats both ends and chars the middle, leaving the whole piece unable to accomplish work. Its question asks whether anything can still succeed at a task, and the image shows that the fire has reached through it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that damage at the edges leaves a usable center: here the fire reaches the middle too.
THE ROOT
יִצְלַח
yitslaḥ
GROWS FROM
צלח
Advance, prosper, succeed.
“prosper in” in this verse is yitslaḥ. The root behind “meet” asks whether the wood can advance, succeed, or accomplish anything at all. The question reaches beyond suitability: the fire has erased its capacity to carry any work forward.
ALSO GROWS
tsalach: Advance, prosper, succeed.
צָלַח
It reveals the force inside “meet”: can any task still move ahead through this wood?
hitzliach: Cause to prosper; make succeed.
הִצְלִיחַ
This causative form names the capacity to bring a task to success, the capacity the charred wood no longer has.
לְאָכְלָה
le'okhlah akhlah
GROWS FROM
אכל
Eat, consume.
“as food” in this verse is le'okhlah akhlah. The verse uses the same אכל seed for wood given “for fuel” and for the fire that “devoureth” it. The fire is called the eater, and the wood its food: burning is pictured as eating.
ALSO GROWS
akhal: Eat, consume.
אָכַל
This is the action the fire performs when it devours the wood’s ends.
okhel: Food.
אֹכֶל
The wood is given over as the fire’s food, so its use in this image is consumption.
THE PATTERN
When a branch is reduced to firewood, its former usefulness cannot survive the burning.
The LORD called your name, a green olive tree, fair, bearing fruit of fine form. With the voice of a great roaring he has kindled fire upon it, and its boughs are shattered.If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown out as a branch and dries up, and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they burn.THE THREAD
This scroll of instruction shall not leave your mouth, but you will murmur over it day and night, so that you will guard to do all that is written in it. For then you will break through on your way, and then you will see clearly.Joshua uses this same צלח root in “prosperous” and “success”; Ezekiel uses it in the question translated “meet.” The shared word makes the question sharper: can the charred wood still advance into any work, or has the fire consumed that capacity?
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