What Does Isaiah 9:18 Mean?
For wickedness burns as the fire; it shall devour the briers and thorns, and kindle in the thickets of the forest, and they shall rise like the lifting of smoke.
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
For wickedness burneth as the fire: it shall devour the briers and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forest, and they shall mount up like the lifting up of smoke.THE KEY
Wickedness is given the appetite and spread of fire, so the forest’s smoke is the visible measure of what it consumes.
THE MEANING
Here, wickedness has fire’s appetite: it consumes the briers and thorns, then catches the dense thickets around them. Its harm spreads through what is connected to it until the landscape rises as smoke. The smoke makes the loss visible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that wickedness stays confined to its first target; it spreads through connected growth and leaves destruction visible at a distance.
THE ROOT
סִבְכֵי
sivkhei
GROWS FROM
סבך
Interweave, entangle; tangled growth.
The word translated “thickets” comes from סבך (savakh), “to interweave or entangle.” The fire reaches the forest’s interlaced growth, so the image shows destruction spreading through the very density of what catches.
ALSO GROWS
sevakh: Thicket; tangled growth.
סְבָךְ
This noun names the dense growth the fire enters.
savakh: To interweave or entangle.
סָבַךְ
The verb reveals the interlaced quality behind the thicket, making the spread through the forest’s growth concrete.
THE PATTERN
A destructive force feeds on what it reaches and spreads through the connected environment around it.
As fire burns the forest, and as a flame kindles the mountains.Even so the tongue is a small limb, and it lifts its neck over great things. Look how great a forest a little fire kindles!For a fire is kindled in my nostrils, and it burns down to the lowest Sheol; it eats the earth with her yield, and sets ablaze the foundations of the mountains.THE THREAD
But the wicked will lose the way, and the enemies of the LORD will be like the weight of the pastures. They will run out, and in smoke they will run out.Both verses use עָשָׁן (ʿāshān), “smoke”: in Isaiah it is what the fire leaves behind; in the psalm, the wicked themselves vanish like smoke. The shared word moves from the visible aftermath to the fate of the force that produces it.
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