What Does Jeremiah 13:24 Mean?
So I will scatter them like the stubble that crosses over in the breath of the wilderness.
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
Therefore will I scatter them as the stubble that passeth away by the wind of the wilderness.THE KEY
The wilderness wind is רוּחַ (ruach, wind/breath/spirit), the same Hebrew word that also means breath.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now of being scattered like dry stubble under a wilderness wind, carried from the place where you stood. It leaves the image severe: the wind bears the stubble away.
THE ROOT
רוּחַ
ruach
GROWS FROM
ר־ו־ח
r-w-ḥ
Wind or moving air; the same word also means breath and spirit.
English gives the force a weather-name, “wind,” but רוּחַ (ruach, wind/breath/spirit) is also used for breath and spirit. The wilderness wind that carries the stubble is named with the same Hebrew word that names breath; these are not separate words.
ALSO GROWS
ruach: Breath; another meaning of the same Hebrew word.
רוּחַ
The wind that carries the stubble shares its word with breath, joining dispersal and breath in the verse’s language.
ruach: Spirit; another meaning of the same Hebrew word.
רוּחַ
English divides what Hebrew holds in one word, so “wind” here echoes a word translated “spirit” elsewhere.
פּוּץ
pûts
GROWS FROM
פ־ו־ץ
p-w-ts
To scatter, disperse, or spread out.
“scatter” in this verse is pûts. The verb names an act that spreads people out from their place. The stubble image makes that scattering something done to them by the wind, not a chosen journey.
ALSO GROWS
wayyāfeṣ: He scattered them.
וַיָּפֶץ
The same root describes people being dispersed, showing the movement from the act of scattering to its human result.
nāfūts: We will be scattered.
נָפוּץ
Here the same root names the condition of dispersion, echoing the loss of place in Jeremiah’s image.
THE PATTERN
The image of chaff marks what cannot remain with the grain: it is carried off by wind or separated from what is gathered.
They are like straw before the breath, and like chaff that a storm steals away.The nations shall crash like the roar of many waters; but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be pursued like chaff of the mountains before the breath, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.Whose winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean his threshing floor, and gather the wheat into the barn; but the chaff he will burn up with fire that cannot be put out.THE THREAD
And the earth was unshaped and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the breath of God was fluttering over the face of the waters.“Spirit” in Genesis and “wind” in Jeremiah translate the same Hebrew word, רוּחַ (ruach, wind/breath/spirit). English separates the movement over the waters from the wilderness force that scatters the stubble; the Hebrew keeps one word at the center of both scenes.
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