What Does Ezekiel 36:14 Mean?
Therefore you will eat people no more, nor make your nations childless any more, says the Lord GOD.
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
Therefore thou shalt devour men no more, neither bereave thy nations any more, saith the Lord GOD.THE KEY
The land is restored when it no longer devours the people formed from its own ground.
THE MEANING
The ground that holds you is not bound to keep consuming its people: the verse declares an end to that appetite and to the collapse of its nations. Its wholeness appears as human lives no longer swallowed and communities no longer brought down.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A land that has consumed its people is condemned to keep doing so.
THE ROOT
תֹאכְלִי
tokhlî
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
eat, consume
“eat” in this verse is tokhlî. The verb makes the land an eater and its people what it consumes. The same root names both eating and food, so the verse pictures human life as swallowed into the land’s appetite, and then declares that appetite ended.
ALSO GROWS
maʾakhal: food; what is eaten
מַאֲכָל
This branch shows what the land’s eating takes in: the people it bears.
ʾokhel: one who eats
אֹכֵל
The land itself is cast as the eater, so its restoration changes what it does to its people.
אָדָם
adam
GROWS FROM
אדם
ʾ-d-m
human; its sound-shape echoes אֲדָמָה (adamah), ground or soil
“people” in this verse is adam. The verse’s “men” are אָדָם (adam, humans), a word the Torah places beside אֲדָמָה (adamah, ground) when it describes human formation. The land devouring humans is therefore, in the word’s own echo, ground consuming the ground-born.
ALSO GROWS
adamah: ground, soil
אֲדָמָה
Its shared consonants bind the people being consumed to the land that consumes them.
adom: red
אָדֹם
This branch carries the same consonants in the word for red, echoing the earth-colored ground from which human life is formed.
תְכַשְׁלִי
tekhashlî
GROWS FROM
כשל
k-sh-l
stumble, totter, fall; in the causative form, make stumble
“make your nations childless” in this verse is tekhashlî. Behind “bereave” is a verb whose root also means to stumble or fall. The harm named here reaches beyond individual loss: a whole people is brought down, and the declaration ends that collapse.
ALSO GROWS
kashal: stumble, fall
כָּשַׁל
This is the root’s basic movement: a people brought to the point of falling.
mikhshol: stumbling block, obstacle
מִכְשׁוֹל
This branch shows how a people can be made to fall through what stands in their way.
THE PATTERN
A world is restored when what surrounds and sustains human life stops consuming its people and making them fall.
And I will raise up my covenant with you; never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, with the birds of the heavens, and with the creeping things of the ground. I will break bow and sword and war from the earth, and I will make them lie down in safety.And God wipes away every tear from their eyes, and there is no more death, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain, for the first things have gone away.THE THREAD
They will no more be plunder for the nations, and the beast of the land will not eat them. They will dwell leaning their full weight, and none will make them tremble.Ezekiel 34:28 uses אָכַל (ʾakhal, eat or consume) for the beast that no longer devours the people. The shared root reveals one pattern across land and predator: restoration ends the consuming of human life.
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