What Does Jeremiah 16:20 Mean?
Shall a man make gods for himself, and they are not gods?
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
Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?THE KEY
The ground-born human can shape something called a god, but naming a handmade thing divine does not make it divine.
THE MEANING
The question exposes a present contradiction: a human makes a thing and then gives it a power and nature it does not possess. What is made remains a made thing, however sacred its name becomes.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The false belief that human making or naming can confer true divinity on an object.
THE ROOT
אָדָם
adam
GROWS FROM
אדם
ʾ-d-m
Red or earth-colored; the root links the human word adam with the ground word adamah.
The word translated “man” is adam, sharing its consonants with adamah, ground. The question places this ground-being in the role of making gods, exposing the gap between shaping something from the ground and giving it divine nature.
ALSO GROWS
adamah: ground, soil
אֲדָמָה
The shared root links the human maker to the ground from which human life is named.
adom: red
אָדוֹם
This branch preserves the root’s reddish, earth-colored sense, another shade carried by the word adam.
יַעֲשֶׂה
ya'aseh
GROWS FROM
עשה
ʿasah
To do, make, or accomplish.
“make” in this verse is ya'aseh. The verse turns on what a human does: making an object does not give it an independent nature beyond its maker. The root keeps the act of making visible beneath the claim that the result is a god.
ALSO GROWS
ma'aseh: deed, work
מַעֲשֶׂה
It names the product or work of an action, keeping the supposed god within the category of something made.
asiyah: making, action
עֲשִׂיָּה
This form keeps the root’s sense of an act of making, the human action at the center of the question.
THE PATTERN
A thing fashioned by human hands cannot become the independent source of power its maker assigns to it.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.And the remainder of it he makes into a god, his hewn image, and falls down to it, and bows down, and prays to it, and says, "Snatch me, for you are my god."Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by craft and by human imagining.THE THREAD
And the remainder of it he makes into a god, his hewn image, and falls down to it, and bows down, and prays to it, and says, "Snatch me, for you are my god."“Maketh” comes from the same Hebrew root עשה (ʿasah), “to make,” as Jeremiah’s question. Isaiah carries the contradiction one step further: the maker asks the work of his own hands to deliver him.
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