What Does Jeremiah 22:5 Mean?
But if you will not hear and respond to these words, by myself I swear, says the LORD, that this house shall become an emptiness.
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
But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself, saith the LORD, that this house shall become a desolation.THE KEY
The house is emptied at the point where hearing no longer becomes response.
THE MEANING
These words summon you to enact justice and free the oppressed (Jeremiah 22:3); the house’s stability depends on hearing them as a call for response, not merely as sound. When they are refused, the house becomes a place emptied of the order that sustains it. The warning speaks now wherever a shared life or structure stands while these words go unanswered.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This verse undoes the belief that a house can remain secure through its walls, rank, or power while its call to justice goes unanswered.
THE ROOT
תִּשְׁמְעוּ
tishmeʿu
GROWS FROM
שמע
Hear, listen, attend.
“hear and respond” in this verse is tishmeʿu. The verse says “if you do not hear,” using shamaʿ, which can carry hearing that attends and responds. The condition is not simply that sound fails to reach the ears: these words fail to take effect in the life of the house.
ALSO GROWS
shemiʿah: Hearing, listening.
שְׁמִיעָה
This related word makes hearing an act of attention, opening the difference between receiving words and letting them matter.
shemuʿah: A report, tidings, something heard.
שְׁמוּעָה
A report becomes meaningful through its reception; here, the words are heard only fully when they shape the house’s response.
לְחָרְבָּה
leḥorbāh
GROWS FROM
חרב
Become dry, be laid waste, become desolate.
“emptiness” in this verse is leḥorbāh. The word for desolation grows from a root that also carries the sense of drying or becoming waste. The house’s ruin is pictured as a loss of what sustains it, following the refusal to hear these words.
ALSO GROWS
ḥārav: To become dry or be laid waste.
חָרַב
The verbal form shows desolation as a process: what is sustained can dry out and become waste.
ḥārēv: Dry, desolate.
חָרֵב
This related form connects the house’s final state with the root’s image of what has lost its life-giving substance.
THE PATTERN
Hearing reaches completion in response; when hearing is severed from action, the structure it should sustain gives way.
Thus says the LORD, Do judgment and alignment, and snatch the robbed out of the hand of the one who presses. Do no wrong, and do no violence to the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, and do not pour out clean blood in this place.But the one who hears and does not do is like a human who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The river burst against it, and at once it fell, and the breaking of that house was great.But be makers of the word, and not hearers only, miscounting yourselves.THE THREAD
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you will hear and respond to his voice.Psalm 95 uses the same root, שמע (shamaʿ, hear and respond), in “if ye will hear his voice.” Jeremiah’s warning turns on hearing these words; the psalm places that response in today.
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