What Does Jeremiah 20:16 Mean?
And let that man be as the cities which the LORD overturned, and did not relent; and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noon.
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
And let that man be as the cities which the LORD overthrew, and repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide;THE KEY
The curse turns judgment into a city-sized reversal whose ruin keeps sounding from morning to noon.
THE MEANING
The verse gives voice to anguish that wants the man to be like a city the LORD overturns without relenting. It imagines him hearing a cry in the morning and a shout at midday, with devastation filling the hours. The curse remains violent and without reprieve.
THE ROOT
הָפַךְ
hāphakh
GROWS FROM
הפך
h-p-k
turn, overturn, reverse
“overturned” in this verse is hāphakh. The root holds both turning and overturning, so the city’s destruction is pictured as a complete reversal. The comparison carries the force of a whole place turned upside down.
ALSO GROWS
hāphakh: turn, overturn
הָפַךְ
This verb is the root form behind the city’s being overturned.
mahpekhah: overthrow, upheaval
מַהְפֵּכָה
This related noun names the kind of overturning recalled when judgment is compared across passages.
נִחָם
niḥām
GROWS FROM
נחם
n-ḥ-m
relent, be moved; in other forms, comfort
“did not relent” in this verse is niḥām. Behind repented is a root that can carry the sense of relenting or being moved, and in other forms it names comfort. Here the negation gives the ruin no reprieve.
ALSO GROWS
niḥām: relent, regret, be moved
נִחָם
This is the verb in the verse: the LORD does not relent.
neḥāmāh: comfort, consolation
נֶחָמָה
The same root also names consolation, revealing a range that includes both being moved and giving comfort.
תְּרוּעָה
terûʿāh
GROWS FROM
רוע
r-w-ʿ
raise a shout, sound an alarm
The word translated shouting can also carry the sense of an alarm shout or signal. Beside the morning cry, it makes the ruin audible again at midday.
ALSO GROWS
rûaʿ: shout, raise a cry
רוּעַ
This verb shares the root behind the shout heard in the verse.
terûʿāh: alarm shout, shout
תְּרוּעָה
This noun names the shout that marks the verse’s midday scene.
THE PATTERN
Judgment is pictured as a place overturned, with its devastation made audible in the cries that follow.
And he overturned those cities, and all the plain, and all who settled in those cities, and what sprouted from the ground.And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the adornment of the Chaldeans' swelling, will be as when God overturned Sodom and Gomorrah.And they throw dust on their heads, and cry out, weeping and mourning, saying, Woe, woe, the great city, in which all who had ships on the sea grew rich by her costliness! For in one hour she has been emptied.THE THREAD
And he overturned those cities, and all the plain, and all who settled in those cities, and what sprouted from the ground.Jeremiah’s comparison echoes the same Hebrew root for overturning used in Genesis’s account of Sodom. The shared root makes the curse city-sized: it imagines a person placed inside the destruction of a whole place.
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