What Does Jeremiah 17:3 Mean?
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.
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
O my mountain in the field, I will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil, and thy high places for sin, throughout all thy borders.THE KEY
The verse turns a mountain’s stored strength into plunder, while naming its elevated places as sites of missing.
THE MEANING
You are confronted with the strength and stored treasures of what is called “my mountain in the field” being handed over as plunder. Its high places are named in relation to missing, and the exposure reaches every border. Elevation, wealth, and belonging do not make a place untouchable.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this undoes is that what is elevated and richly stored cannot be taken.
THE ROOT
לָבַז
lāḇaz
GROWS FROM
בזז
To plunder or seize as spoil.
“plunder” in this verse is lāḇaz. The word translated “spoil” names a transfer through seizure, not merely a loss. What the verse calls substance and treasure becomes what another can carry away.
ALSO GROWS
bizzāh: Spoil, plunder.
בִּזָּה
This noun makes the transfer tangible: possessions become what a plunderer takes.
bāzaz: To plunder, seize.
בָּזַז
The verb shows the force behind “spoil”: someone takes what had been held.
חֵילְךָ
ḥēyləḵā
GROWS FROM
חיל
Strength, force, or capacity; by extension, wealth and resources.
The word rendered “substance” can carry both material wealth and strength. The verse exposes the amassed capacity itself to seizure, so possessions do not stand apart from power.
ALSO GROWS
ḥayil: Strength, wealth, or resources.
חַיִל
This sense shows that “substance” includes accumulated capacity, not just objects.
ḥēyl: Force, host, or army.
חֵיל
The same consonants can name organized force, deepening the sense of what the verse hands over.
חַטָּאת
ḥaṭṭāʾt
GROWS FROM
חטא
To miss, err, or go wrong.
“falling short” in this verse is ḥaṭṭāʾt. The KJV word “sin” carries the root sense of missing or going wrong. Here that word is attached to the high places, locating the verse’s charge in what happens there rather than leaving it as an abstract label.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss, err, or sin.
חָטָא
The verb opens “sin” back to the concrete sense of missing.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Missing, offense, or sin.
חַטָּאת
This is the word family behind the verse’s phrase about high places and sin.
THE PATTERN
Stored wealth remains exposed to loss, seizure, and decay, so possession cannot guarantee safety.
Will you make your eyes take flight upon what is not? For riches surely make wings for themselves, and they fly away like an eagle toward the heavens.Do not store up for yourselves treasures upon the ground, where moth and rust gnaw them out of sight, and where thieves dig through and steal.For you suffered with me in my chains, and took in with joy the seizing of your holdings, knowing that you hold for yourselves in the heavens a better and remaining existence.THE THREAD
All this is through the rebellion of Jacob, and through the missed marks of the house of Israel. What is the rebellion of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what are the high places of Judah? Are they not Jerusalem?Micah uses בָּמוֹת (bamot, “high places”) and חַטֹּאות (ḥaṭṭōʾt, “sins”), echoing Jeremiah’s high places and the חַטָּאת (ḥaṭṭāʾt, “missing”) attached to them. The shared wording sharpens Jeremiah’s charge: these heights are bound to the passage’s naming of missing.
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