What Does Jeremiah 14:4 Mean?
Because the ground is shattered, for there has been no rain in the land, the tillers were ashamed, and they covered their heads.
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
Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for ground shares its consonants with the word for human, so the drought reaches the ground-being through the soil.
THE MEANING
When rain does not come, the ground cracks and the people who work it carry the drought on their bodies. The barren field and the farmers covering their heads show the land’s distress reaching human life. This speaks wherever what sustains people stops arriving.
THE ROOT
הָאֲדָמָה
ha’adamah
GROWS FROM
אדם
אדם (ʾ-d-m) carries the sense of redness; אֲדָמָה names soil or ground.
The consonants אדם link the soil with אָדָם (adam, human), a wordplay made explicit when Genesis describes the human formed from the ground. Here the plowmen’s distress belongs to the same earth they cultivate; the land is not merely a backdrop to their lives.
ALSO GROWS
adam: Human, person
אָדָם
It shares the consonants אדם with אֲדָמָה, linking human life to the soil.
adom: Red
אָדֹם
It shares the same consonants and carries the root’s association with redness into the word-family of the ground.
רֹאשָׁם
rosham
GROWS FROM
ראש
רֹאשׁ (rosh) means head, top, or foremost.
“covered their heads” in this verse is rosham. The word for the farmers’ heads shares its consonants with רֵאשִׁית (reshit, beginning or first). The covered heads make their response visible in the body, while the root’s wider range connects the head with what is foremost.
ALSO GROWS
rosh: Head, top, chief
רֹאשׁ
It is the singular form in the same root-family as the farmers’ heads.
reshit: Beginning, first
רֵאשִׁית
It shares the root’s consonants and extends the head’s sense of what is foremost into the idea of a beginning.
THE PATTERN
When creation’s needed provision is absent, its distress reaches both the land and the lives that depend on it.
And no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no grass of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no human to serve the ground.And also I held back the rain from you while three months remained to the reaping. I rained upon one city, and upon another city I did not rain. One piece was rained upon, and the piece where it did not rain dried up.For we know that the whole creation groans together and labors together in the pangs of birth until now.THE THREAD
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.Jeremiah’s הָאֲדָמָה (ha’adamah, ground) shares its consonants with אָדָם (adam, human), and Genesis places that wordplay in the human formed from the ground. The drought in Jeremiah’s soil reaches the people who cultivate it because their lives are bound to the same earth.
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