What Does Isaiah 3:18 Mean?
In that day the Lord will remove the adornment of their jingling anklets, and their nets, and their crescents.
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
In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon,THE KEY
The ornaments are called their “splendor,” so the Lord’s removal reaches the visible form of the glory they carry.
THE MEANING
The verse places the reader before a stripping away: outward splendor is something the Lord can remove. These ornaments carry beauty and distinction, but they cannot make themselves permanent. The image speaks wherever appearance has become proof of worth.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that beauty or status is secure because it is possessed dissolves here: the verse shows that what displays splendor can be taken away.
THE ROOT
תִּפְאֶרֶת
tiferet
GROWS FROM
פאר
To adorn, beautify, or glorify; to make splendid.
Here “bravery” carries the older sense of finery: the Hebrew calls the ornaments themselves the wearers’ splendor. The root joins visible adornment with glory, so what is removed is not merely jewelry but the outward display of that splendor.
ALSO GROWS
pe'er: An ornament or headdress.
פְּאֵר
This sibling word can name a physical adornment, showing how the root’s idea of splendor takes visible form.
pa'ar: To adorn, beautify, or glorify.
פָּאַר
The verb makes the connection explicit: the ornaments display the beauty and glory named by the noun in this verse.
יָסִיר
yasir
GROWS FROM
סור
To turn aside or depart; in the causative form, to remove or make something depart.
“remove” in this verse is yasir. The removal is expressed as making something depart. The verse presents splendor as actively taken away, not as something that simply fades on its own.
ALSO GROWS
sur: To turn aside or depart.
סוּר
This basic form shows the movement inside “take away”: what is removed is made to turn aside and leave.
hesir: He removed or took away; a causative form of the root.
הֵסִיר
This related form makes the action plain: removal is causing something to depart.
THE PATTERN
Visible human glory can be stripped or wither; it cannot make itself endure.
The lifted eyes of man shall be brought low, and the heights of men shall bow down, and the LORD alone shall be lifted high in that day.For all flesh is as grass, and all its weight is as the blossom of grass. The grass dries, and the blossom falls.For the sun rises with its scorching heat, and dries the grass, and its flower falls, and the beauty of its shape perishes; so also the rich one withers in his goings.THE THREAD
To set for those who mourn in Zion, to give them a headdress in place of ash, the oil of leaping for mourning, the garment of praise in place of a dimmed breath; that they might be called oaks of alignment, the planting of the LORD, that he might be adorned.Isaiah 3:18 uses תִּפְאֶרֶת (tiferet, splendor); Isaiah 61:3 uses פְּאֵר (pe’er, adornment or headdress) in “beauty for ashes.” The shared root makes splendor something that can be removed in one scene and received in another.
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