What Does Isaiah 19:5 Mean?
And the waters will fail from the sea, and the river will go dry and parched.
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
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.THE KEY
The drying reaches from the sea to the river, leaving no scale of water untouched.
THE MEANING
The image speaks to the reader now: even a vast reserve can empty, and the river can dry alongside it. The loss reaches beyond one channel; the whole water-world is pictured as failing.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that a source seems too vast to fail, so its channels must be secure.
THE ROOT
יֶחֱרַב
yeḥĕrav
GROWS FROM
חרב
ḥ-r-b
Become dry or desolate.
Here, “wasted” carries the sense of becoming dry and desolate; this root also gives Hebrew a word for ruin. The river’s loss of water registers as devastation.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōrev: Drought; dryness.
חֹרֶב
It shows how this root names the condition behind the river’s collapse.
ḥorbah: Ruin; desolation.
חָרְבָּה
It carries the river’s drying into the wider image of a landscape laid waste.
וְיָבֵשׁ
wəyāvēš
GROWS FROM
יבש
y-b-sh
Be dry or wither.
“parched” in this verse is wəyāvēš. This root names both drying and the dry land left when water withdraws. The second verb makes the river’s end explicit: its flow gives way to dryness.
ALSO GROWS
yabbāšāh: Dry land; dry ground.
יַבָּשָׁה
The same word family links a river’s drying with the ground that remains.
yāvēš: Become dry; wither.
יָבֵשׁ
This verb is the root’s basic action, repeated here to complete the image of depletion.
THE PATTERN
When water fails, the waterways and the order they support are reshaped.
He turns rivers into a wilderness, and the outgoings of waters into a thirsting ground.The sixth messenger pours out his bowl upon the great river Euphrates, and its water is dried up, so that the way of the kings from the rising of the sun is made ready.THE THREAD
As the waters drain from the sea, and the river dries and parches.Job 14:11 repeats יֶחֱרַב (yeḥĕrav, become dry or desolate) and יָבֵשׁ (yāvēš, dry up or wither) in the same sequence. Here, that pair describes the river; in Job, it makes the disappearance of the waters a measure of what vanishes.
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