What Does Jeremiah 18:14 Mean?
Does the snow of Lebanon let go of the rock of the field? Or are the strange, cold, flowing waters uprooted?
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
Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon which cometh from the rock of the field? or shall the cold flowing waters that come from another place be forsaken?THE KEY
The verse makes abandoning what sustains life seem stranger than snow disappearing from Lebanon or cold streams forsaking their course.
THE MEANING
The verse sets before the reader what stays in its course: Lebanon’s snow and cold waters keep their place and flow. Against that steadiness, abandoning a life-giving source appears as a rupture rather than a natural drift. The question speaks now wherever a sustaining source is treated as disposable.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that you can leave what sustains you without severing anything dissolves here: the verse portrays that abandonment as a break in the order of life.
THE ROOT
יַעֲזֹב
yaʿazov
GROWS FROM
עזב
ʿ-z-b
to leave, abandon, or forsake
The root עזב (ʿ-z-b), meaning “leave” or “forsake,” carries more than simple departure: it can name severing a bond. Jeremiah uses this same root for forsaking the fountain of living waters, making the natural image here a measure of what abandonment means.
ALSO GROWS
ʿazav: to leave, abandon, or forsake
עָזַב
This verb form shows that leaving can mean relinquishing a sustaining bond, not merely moving away.
ʿazuv: left behind or abandoned
עָזוּב
The passive form makes visible what abandonment creates: something or someone left without the bond that held them.
יִנָּתְשׁוּ
yinnateshu
GROWS FROM
נטש
n-ṭ-sh
to pull away, uproot, or abandon
“Does the snow let go of” in this verse is yinnateshu. The second verb does not repeat the first: it comes from נטש (n-ṭ-sh), meaning “pull away” or “uproot.” English gives both actions as leaving, while Hebrew lets the second question carry the sharper image of a sustaining flow torn from its course.
ALSO GROWS
natash: to pull up, uproot, or abandon
נָטַשׁ
Its uprooting sense makes the question about more than distance: it pictures a source or bond being torn away.
nittash: to be pulled away or abandoned
נִטָּשׁ
This passive form echoes the verse’s image of waters being severed from their continuing flow.
THE PATTERN
Life is pictured as a sustained flow from its source, while forsaking that source is a rupture in the flow.
For my people have done two evils; they have let go of me, the spring of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, shattered cisterns that cannot grip water.And he becomes like a tree planted by the channels of the waters, that gives its fruit in its season; its leaf does not wither; whatever he does, he breaks through.The one who leans his weight into me, as the writing has said, rivers of living waters will flow from his belly.THE THREAD
For my people have done two evils; they have let go of me, the spring of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, shattered cisterns that cannot grip water.Jeremiah uses the same root עזב (ʿ-z-b), meaning “leave” or “forsake,” for abandoning the fountain of living waters. That shared seed turns the natural question here into a precise image: the rupture is severing oneself from the source that sustains life.
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