What Does Jeremiah 18:1 Mean?
The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying,
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
The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying,THE KEY
The word is not detached information; it is speech that arrives as an encounter.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks to you as a movement: a word has a source, comes near, and speaks. It places you in the position of a person addressed, where revelation is encounter rather than distant information.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the belief that God’s word is only information to study from a distance.
THE ROOT
דָּבָר
dābār
GROWS FROM
דבר
To speak or utter; as a noun, the speech or matter spoken.
Dābār can name both an utterance and the matter at hand, so “the word” is not a detached sentence. Its movement toward Jeremiah is part of its meaning: what is spoken becomes an encounter.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: He spoke; uttered.
דִּבֵּר
The noun “word” grows from the same root as the act of speaking, keeping the utterance alive in the verse.
devarim: Words; matters or affairs.
דְּבָרִים
Because this root can name both words and matters, the arriving word carries something real into the encounter.
THE PATTERN
God’s word appears as an arrival that meets a person and becomes a living encounter.
After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, saying, Do not fear, Abram. I am your shield, and your very great wages.The word of the LORD came, indeed came, to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar, and the hand of the LORD was there upon him.And the word became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we beheld his weight, the weight as of the only-born from the Father, full of favor and truth.THE THREAD
Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying,This repeats the same Hebrew word, דָּבָר (dābār, word or matter), and the same arrival pattern. The opening of Jeremiah’s words and this line share a single movement: speech comes near and addresses a person.
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