What Does Jeremiah 15:13 Mean?
Your strength and your storehouses I will give to plunder without price, for all your shortcomings, and in all your borders.
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
Thy substance and thy treasures will I give to the spoil without price, and that for all thy sins, even in all thy borders.THE KEY
The verse turns what is held as treasure into exposed spoil: it can be handed over without any exchange.
THE MEANING
The verse confronts you with the possibility of real dispossession: what you hold as substance and treasure can be handed over for plunder without a price. It binds that judgment to all the missing and carries its reach through every border.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that wealth guarantees protection or that loss always comes through a fair exchange; here, treasure is handed over as spoil without price.
THE ROOT
לָבַז
lāḇaz
GROWS FROM
בזז
b-z-z
To plunder or seize as spoil.
This word names seized property, not a negotiated sale or an ordinary decrease. Paired with “without price,” it makes the transfer stark: what you hold can become another’s plunder without an exchange.
ALSO GROWS
baz: Property taken as spoil.
בַּז
It names what the substance and treasures become when handed over.
bazaz: To seize and carry off as spoil.
בָּזַז
The verb makes the loss an act of taking, matching the verse’s image of dispossession.
אֹצָרוֹתֶיךָ
ʾōṣārōteḵā
GROWS FROM
אצר
ʾ-ṣ-r
To store up or gather into a store.
“storehouses” in this verse is ʾōṣārōteḵā. A treasure is what has been gathered and kept. Here, the storehouse does not secure what it contains: the stored thing becomes the spoil.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāṣar: To gather and keep in store.
אָצַר
It reveals the act of accumulation beneath the treasures named in the verse.
ʾōṣār: A place where goods are stored, or the goods themselves.
אוֹצָר
The same word holds both the container and its contents, which are now exposed to seizure.
חַטֹּאותֶיךָ
ḥaṭṭōʾōteḵā
GROWS FROM
חטא
ḥ-ṭ-ʾ
To miss or go wrong.
“shortcomings” in this verse is ḥaṭṭōʾōteḵā. The root gives “sins” the concrete sense of missing the mark. Beside the phrase about every border, that missing is bound to a dispossession whose reach is comprehensive.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss the mark or err.
חָטָא
It brings the root’s concrete sense to the verse’s account of what the judgment answers.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: A missing or sin; in some contexts, an offering for the missing.
חַטָּאת
It shows how the root can name both the failure and what is associated with addressing it.
THE PATTERN
When judgment reaches what a person has stored, accumulated wealth cannot guarantee its retention or deliverance.
Riches do not profit on the day of overflowing, but alignment snatches from death.As he comes from his mother's womb, naked he turns back to go as he comes. He lifts nothing from his toil that he can go away with in his hand.But God said to him, Mindless one, this night your living soul will be demanded back from you. Then whose will those things be that you have made ready?THE THREAD
O my mountain in the field, I will give your strength and all your storehouses to plunder, and your high places for falling short throughout all your borders.The same cluster returns almost verbatim: substance, treasures, spoil, and all borders. That shared wording sharpens “without price” here, the repeated image is stored wealth handed over as plunder.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us