What Does Jeremiah 16:3 Mean?
For thus says the LORD concerning the sons and the daughters born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them, and concerning their fathers who begot them in this land.
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
For thus saith the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land;THE KEY
One Hebrew birth-root holds the child, the mother who bears, and the father who begets inside one family line, just as judgment reaches that line together.
THE MEANING
This verse makes the family line impossible to abstract: each child stands beside the mother who bears and the father who begets. When catastrophe falls on the land, a child’s beginning does not guarantee shelter from its reach. The sentence makes the cost of collective violence visible in bodies and generations.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that new life is automatically sheltered from a people’s catastrophe: the children and the parents who bring them forth stand within its reach.
THE ROOT
הַיִּלּוֹדִים
hayyillodim
GROWS FROM
י־ל־ד
y-l-d
to bear, bring forth, beget
The verse repeats the same root in three forms: the children are born, the mothers bear, and the fathers beget. Hebrew holds the child’s arrival and the parents’ generative acts in one word-family, making the threatened future a family line rather than an abstraction.
ALSO GROWS
yeled: child
יֶלֶד
The child’s name shares the birth-root, keeping the one born connected to the act of bringing forth.
toledot: generations; descendants
תּוֹלְדוֹת
This branch carries birth forward into lineage, echoing how the verse places children and both parents within one generational chain.
yoled: one who bears or begets
יוֹלֵד
This form names the parent through the same root that names the child’s birth, joining the two sides of the family line.
THE PATTERN
When judgment reaches a people, scripture names the children and the parents who bring them forth, making the danger bodily and generational.
You shall bear sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours; for they shall go into captivity.Though they raise their children, yet will I make them childless, until no man remains. Yes, woe also to them when I turn aside from them!In Ramah a voice was heard, wailing, and weeping, and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are not.THE THREAD
You shall bear sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours; for they shall go into captivity.The Hebrew word translated “beget” here shares the root י־ל־ד (y-l-d), meaning “to bear, bring forth, beget,” with the three birth-forms in Jeremiah. Deuteronomy makes the threatened consequence explicit: the same line of children brought forth is the line carried into captivity.
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