What Does Jeremiah 18:21 Mean?
Therefore, give their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the hands of the sword. Let their wives be made childless and widowed, and let their men be struck down in death, and let their young men be pierced by the sword in battle.
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
Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved of their children, and be widows; and let their men be put to death; let their young men be slain by the sword in battle.THE KEY
The first verb makes this devastation a sequence of handovers: the children are given to famine, and the sword takes the men.
THE MEANING
You are confronted with a plea for collective destruction in unsoftened terms: children are handed to famine, women are bereaved and widowed, and men are killed. The verse holds bodily slaughter and the rupture of family life in the same frame. Its language leaves the violence explicit.
THE ROOT
תֵּן
ten
GROWS FROM
נתן
n-t-n
give, set, place
The verb is נתן, “give, set, place,” in the imperative: the children are placed within famine’s reach. Its family includes מַתָּנָה (mattanah), “gift,” and נְתִינִים (netinim), “those given”; here, the verb of giving names a violent handover.
ALSO GROWS
mattanah: gift; something given
מַתָּנָה
It shares the give-root with תֵּן, revealing the range of this root from gift to forced transfer.
netinim: those given; a group assigned to service
נְתִינִים
Its sense of being given echoes the children being placed into famine’s reach.
חֶרֶב
ḥerev
GROWS FROM
חרב
ḥ-r-b
dry up, become waste or desolate
The consonant family carries the sense of drying up or laying waste alongside the word for sword. That echo binds the weapon to desolation as the verse traces death through households.
ALSO GROWS
ḥārav: to dry up or become desolate
חָרַב
The shared consonants connect the sword with the language of a place or people laid waste.
ḥorbāh: ruin, desolation
חָרְבָּה
This branch makes audible the devastation surrounding the sword’s repeated blows.
שַׁכֻּלוֹת
shakkulot
GROWS FROM
שכל
sh-k-l
be bereaved, especially through the loss of children
“made childless” in this verse is shakkulot. The root names bereavement through the loss of children, making this more specific than a general loss. Beside “widows,” it maps devastation across both the child and spouse bonds.
ALSO GROWS
shākal: to be bereaved of children; to miscarry
שָׁכַל
This verb shares the root of “bereaved” and keeps the focus on loss across generations.
shakkul: bereaved; childless
שַׁכּוּל
This related form names the condition the verse assigns to the wives.
THE PATTERN
Collective violence becomes visible through bodies killed and family bonds broken.
Better are the pierced by the sword than the pierced by hunger, for these are emptied and split open for want of the fruits of the field.Yet she was uncovered and went into captivity; her infants also were dashed at the head of every street, and they cast lots for her weighty ones, and all her great ones were bound in chains.And I see, and look, a grass-green horse, and the name of the one seated upon it is Death, and Hades follows with him. And power is given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
And I will bring a sword upon you that shall avenge my covenant. When you are gathered together within your cities, I will send the plague among you, and you shall be given into the hand of the enemy.“Ye shall be delivered” renders a passive form of נתן, the same give-root as Jeremiah’s “deliver up.” Both verses frame catastrophe as a handing-over, with the sword and other forms of death closing around a people.
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