What Does Jeremiah 10:17 Mean?
Gather your bundle up from the ground, O you who settle under siege.
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
Gather up thy wares out of the land, O inhabitant of the fortress.THE KEY
The fortress does not cancel departure: the first act is to gather what can be carried out.
THE MEANING
The verse addresses you as someone living in a fortress and gives an immediate command: gather your goods out of the land. The stronghold does not make staying possible; what can be gathered is already being moved toward departure.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a fortified place makes your possessions and your place in the land permanent.
THE ROOT
אִסְפִּי
ʾispî
GROWS FROM
אסף
To gather, collect, or bring in.
“Gather” in this verse is ʾispî. Hebrew pictures separate goods being brought into a collected whole. Here the gathering is directed out of the land, so it begins a departure; it does not promise that the fortress will preserve what has been gathered.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāsaph: To gather, collect, or bring in.
אָסַף
This verb form makes explicit the gathering action carried by the command in the verse.
ʾăsēphāh: Assembly or gathering.
אֲסֵפָה
The same root can describe a gathering of people, showing how the action collects separate things into one group.
THE PATTERN
When a place of shelter becomes untenable, the word turns life and its belongings toward departure.
And it came to pass, when they had brought them outside, that he said, Escape for your living soul. Do not look behind you, and do not stand still anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountain, lest you be swept away.Let the one on the roof not come down to lift anything out of his house.THE THREAD
Gather to me my faithful ones, those who cut my covenant over the slaughtered offering.Both verses use אסף (ʾasaph), “gather”: Jeremiah gathers wares out of the land, while the psalm gathers people to God. The shared root makes the direction of the gathering part of its meaning.
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