What Does Jeremiah 14:11 Mean?
Then the LORD said to me, Do not pray for this people for their good.
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
Then said the LORD unto me, Pray not for this people for their good.THE KEY
Hebrew casts prayer as entering another’s case, and this verse draws a hard boundary around that intervention.
THE MEANING
This verse meets you with a severe limit on intercession: this people’s welfare is not to be the object of prayer. The reason is left unstated here, so the force falls on the refusal itself and on the limit it places on what prayer can secure.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that sincere prayer guarantees the requested good for every people; here, intercession for their welfare is expressly barred.
THE ROOT
תִּתְפַּלֵּל
titpallel
GROWS FROM
פלל
palal
Interpose, intervene, or adjudicate; in the reflexive form used here, pray or intercede.
“pray” in this verse is titpallel. The verb is the reflexive form of palal, whose wider range includes intervening in a matter. English can make prayer sound like words alone; this root also carries the sense of stepping into a case, and here that intervention is forbidden for this people’s good.
ALSO GROWS
tefillah: Prayer, supplication
תְּפִלָּה
This prayer noun shares the root, keeping prayer connected to the act of intervening or appealing in a matter.
pelilim: Judges, arbiters
פְּלִילִים
This related word for those who adjudicate shows the root’s connection to entering a case for judgment.
THE PATTERN
Intercession is consequential, yet scripture marks limits to when it may be offered and what it can change.
Then the LORD said to me, Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my living soul could not be toward this people. Send them from my face, and let them go out.If anyone sees his brother miss the mark with a shortcoming that is not toward death, he asks, and he gives him life for those who miss the mark, not toward death; there is a shortcoming toward death. I do not say that he should ask about that.THE THREAD
In place of my love they stand against me, but I am prayer.The word translated “prayer” is תְּפִלָּה (tefillah), from the same פלל (palal) root as “pray” here. Psalm 109:4 shows this root as a posture of intercession; Jeremiah’s command lands sharply because it stops that act on this people’s behalf.
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