What Does Jeremiah 2:15 Mean?
The young lions roared over him and gave their voice; they set his land for emptiness, and his cities were burned, without one who settles in them.
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 young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his land waste: his cities are burned without inhabitant.THE KEY
The roar is the opening sound of a land becoming שַׁמָּה (shammah), desolation.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks wherever predatory force bears down on a people: land becomes desolate, cities burn, and inhabitants are gone. The roar is paired with a visible result, so the devastation reaches beyond fear into the place people live.
THE ROOT
לְשַׁמָּה
le-shammāh
GROWS FROM
שׁמם
sh-m-m
Be desolate or appalled; lay waste.
“emptiness” in this verse is le-shammāh. The root gathers the land’s ruin into the condition of desolation, while a related form can describe being appalled by that devastation. The burned cities without inhabitants make that condition visible.
ALSO GROWS
shemamah: Desolation; a deserted place.
שְׁמָמָה
It names the state the land enters when the young lions overrun it.
shamem: To be desolate or appalled.
שָׁמֵם
It connects the physical ruin of the land with the stunned response to devastation.
THE PATTERN
Predatory power announces itself through a roar and turns that threat into the taking or devastation of human life.
Their roaring shall be like a lion, and they shall roar like young lions. Yes, they shall roar, and seize the prey, and carry it off to safety, and none shall snatch it back.As a roaring lion and a ranging bear, so is a wicked ruler over the emptied people.THE THREAD
The lion comes up from his thicket, and the destroyer of nations sets out; he goes forth from his place to empty your land, and your cities are uprooted, with none settling in them.Both verses use the root שׁמם (sh-m-m) for a land made desolate. Jeremiah 4:7 opens the same image further: the lion’s approach, the ruined land, and the empty cities recur together.
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