What Does Isaiah 5:9 Mean?
In my ears, the LORD of hosts says, Surely many houses shall be emptied, even the great and the fair, without one who settles.
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 mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.THE KEY
A house can remain standing and still be ruined: its ruin is that no one dwells there.
THE MEANING
This verse names a living fracture: a place can be large and beautiful while emptied of the people who make it a home. The LORD’s word makes that emptiness audible, exposing how abundance can contain its own desolation.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that size, beauty, and possession are proof of fullness.
THE ROOT
לְשַׁמָּה
ləshammāh
GROWS FROM
שׁמם
To be desolate, devastated, or appalled.
“emptied” in this verse is ləshammāh. The root holds ruin and stunned desolation together: what is laid waste is also something that leaves the witness appalled. English “desolate” carries the emptiness, while the Hebrew root lets you hear the shock within it.
ALSO GROWS
shamem: To be desolate or appalled.
שָׁמֵם
The same root describes both the ruined condition and the stunned response it produces.
shemamah: Desolation, waste.
שְׁמָמָה
This noun makes the condition itself visible: the house is not merely unoccupied but rendered a wasteland.
יוֹשֵׁב
yōshēv
GROWS FROM
ישׁב
To sit, remain, or dwell.
The verse does not say that the buildings disappear; it says there is no one dwelling in them. Hebrew’s inhabitant is a dweller, one who settles into a place, so the emptiness is the severing of shelter from the life it is meant to hold.
ALSO GROWS
yashav: To sit, stay, or dwell.
יָשַׁב
The inhabitant is defined by the act of remaining in the house.
moshav: A dwelling place or settlement.
מוֹשָׁב
A dwelling is a place made meaningful by someone settling there.
THE PATTERN
Accumulated structures can become empty when possession displaces the conditions of dwelling.
Woe to those who reach house to house, who draw field to field, until there is no room, so that you may be settled alone in the midst of the earth!And I will make Jerusalem heaps of stone, and a den of jackals, and I will make the cities of Judah a waste, with none settling in them.Look, your house is left to you, empty.THE THREAD
Woe to those who reach house to house, who draw field to field, until there is no room, so that you may be settled alone in the midst of the earth!Both verses repeat bayit, “house”: in verse 8 houses are joined until there is no place, and in verse 9 the houses are left without a dweller. The shared word reveals the sequence: expanding possession can erase the room a house exists to hold.
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