What Does Jeremiah 13:14 Mean?
And I will dash them one against another, the fathers and the sons together, says the LORD. I will not pity, nor spare, nor have compassion, but ruin them.
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 I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the LORD: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them.THE KEY
Even the bond between fathers and sons cannot interrupt the shattering, because the verse names compassion only to say it is withheld.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now with a hard image of destruction: fathers and sons are struck together, and pity, sparing, and compassion are named only as what will not restrain the blow. The text does not soften that violence through kinship; it holds the loss of protection in full view.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that kinship automatically shields people from devastation cannot survive this sentence: fathers and sons are struck together, with no mercy named to spare them.
THE ROOT
אֲרַחֵם
ʾaraḥēm
GROWS FROM
רחם
To have compassion; this root family also names the womb.
The verse’s “I will not have mercy” uses a form of רחם (raḥam), whose word family names both compassion and the womb. The negation is stark: the language of deep, sheltering tenderness is explicitly withheld.
ALSO GROWS
raḥamim: Compassion, mercies
רַחֲמִים
This is the same root family as the denied mercy in the verse, showing that compassion itself is named as absent.
reḥem: Womb
רֶחֶם
This branch carries the root’s bodily association with sheltering tenderness, giving the withheld compassion an intimate depth.
THE PATTERN
Scripture can portray violence as reaching through the closest family bonds, without treating kinship as guaranteed refuge.
Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of you, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will do judgments in you, and all your remnant I will winnow into every breath.And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and everyone will eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and in the pressing, with which their enemies, and those who seek their living souls, will press them.Brother will hand brother over to death, and father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to die.THE THREAD
And Joseph hurried, for his compassion was warmed toward his brother. And he sought where to weep, and he entered into his inner room, and wept there.The compassion that “yearn[s]” in Genesis comes from the same רחם (raḥam) word family that Jeremiah negates. Set beside Joseph’s tenderness toward his brother, Jeremiah’s words reveal the full force of what is withheld.
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