What Does Habakkuk 2:15 Mean?
Woe to the one who gives his neighbor drink, mixing in your heat and making him drunk also, so that you may look upon their nakedness!
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
Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness!THE KEY
The woe falls on the one who makes a neighbor drunk in order to turn their exposure into a spectacle.
THE MEANING
This verse names the cruelty of creating another person’s impairment so their vulnerability can be used for someone else’s gaze. The woe rests on the one who supplies the drink and seeks the exposure; the neighbor’s condition is not the source of the shame.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that someone’s intoxication or nakedness makes them available to another person’s gaze. The verse places responsibility on the one who engineers the impairment and exploits the exposure.
THE ROOT
שַׁכֵּר
shakker
GROWS FROM
שכר
sh-k-r
To be intoxicated; in a causative form, to make drunk.
“making him drunk also” in this verse is shakker. The same root names intoxication and the act of causing it. The neighbor’s impairment is bound to the agent’s deliberate action: the exposure is prepared, not accidental.
ALSO GROWS
shekhar: An intoxicating drink.
שֵׁכָר
It names the drink associated with intoxication, linking what is supplied to the state the agent produces.
shikkor: A drunk or intoxicated person.
שִׁכּוֹר
The same root names the person in the state this verse’s actor deliberately causes.
הַבִּיט
habbit
GROWS FROM
נבט
n-b-t
To look or gaze.
The Hebrew root behind “look” also forms a noun for a gaze. Here looking is not incidental: the verse makes it the stated purpose of making the neighbor drunk.
ALSO GROWS
nabat: To look or behold.
נָבַט
This is the verbal root behind the verse’s stated aim of looking.
mabbat: A look or gaze.
מַבָּט
The related noun keeps the act of seeing tied to the gaze that the verse exposes as the agent’s purpose.
THE PATTERN
How a vulnerable body is treated reveals whether the gaze serves appetite or honor.
And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.And those parts of the body that we think to be lighter, these we clothe with more abundant weight, and our unshaped parts have more abundant shapeliness.THE THREAD
Wine is a mocker, strong drink is roaring, and whoever reels in it is not wise.Habakkuk uses a causative form of שכר: the actor makes a neighbor drunk for the sake of looking. Proverbs uses שֵׁכָר for strong drink and links intoxication with mockery and deception, bringing the drink, impaired judgment, and degrading gaze into one thread.
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