What Does Ezekiel 5:15 Mean?
So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, a straightening and an astonishment to the nations all around you, when I do judgments in you in the burning of my anger, and in my heat, and in heated rebukes. I, the LORD, have spoken it.
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
So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall execute judgments in thee in anger and in fury and in furious rebukes. I the LORD have spoken it.THE KEY
The city’s devastation becomes instruction: the people around it read the judgment as a public lesson.
THE MEANING
Where a community’s consequences are visible to those around it, its condition can become both reproach and instruction. The judgment named here is severe, anger, fury, and rebuke, and the LORD’s spoken word gives it force.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a community’s consequences remain private: here, those around it see them and learn from them.
THE ROOT
מוּסָר
musar
GROWS FROM
יסר
to discipline, correct, or chastise
“straightening” in this verse is musar. English instruction can sound like information, while musar (מוּסָר, discipline or correction) carries the force of correction. Here that correction becomes visible through public devastation, a severe lesson named alongside reproach and astonishment.
ALSO GROWS
yāsar: to discipline or correct
יָסַר
The verb shows the corrective force carried by the instruction in this verse.
yissurim: chastisements or afflictions
יִסּוּרִים
This related form makes clear that musar can involve painful correction, as it does here.
THE PATTERN
A community’s exposed consequences can become a public lesson to the people who witness them.
And all the nations will say, "Why has the LORD done this to this land? What means the burning of this great anger?"And many nations shall cross by this city, and each man shall say to his neighbor, Why has the LORD done this to this great city?Now all these things happened to them as imprints, and they were written to set our minds, for the ends of the ages have come upon us.THE THREAD
To know wisdom and straightening, to discern the words of distinction.The word rendered “instruction” here is musar (מוּסָר, correction or instruction), the same Hebrew word in Proverbs’ purpose statement. Proverbs places musar within wisdom; Ezekiel shows the severe form it can take when a community’s judgment becomes visible to others.
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