What Does Jeremiah 25:15 Mean?
For thus says the LORD God of Israel to me, Take this cup of burning wine from my hand, and make all the nations, to whom I send you, drink it.
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
For thus saith the LORD God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it.THE KEY
The cup makes fury something held, carried, and made to enter the nations themselves.
THE MEANING
Here, divine fury is not an abstraction: it is a cup in the LORD’s hand, carried by the one he sends and drunk by every nation named. Judgment passes from the hand into the body; the nations receive its full force as something they must drink.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a nation’s power or distance places it beyond judgment is undone here: the verse names all the nations as drinkers of the cup.
THE ROOT
וְהִשְׁקִיתָה
we-hishqîtāh
GROWS FROM
שקה
š-q-h
To give drink, water, or irrigate; in this causative form, to make someone drink.
“cause ... to drink” in this verse is we-hishqîtāh. The verb makes the messenger an agent of the drinking: he does not merely present the cup; he causes the nations to take it in. The same root can describe watering, an act that sustains life, while here it carries the cup of fury.
ALSO GROWS
shaqah: To give drink, water, or irrigate
שָׁקָה
The root’s ordinary image of watering gives the forced drinking in this verse its stark physical weight.
mashqeh: A drink or beverage; a cupbearer
מַשְׁקֶה
The word can name both what is drunk and the one who serves it, echoing the verse’s cup and the messenger who carries it.
הַחֵמָה
ha-ḥēmāh
GROWS FROM
חמה
ḥ-m-h
Heat; to be hot or grow hot.
“burning” in this verse is ha-ḥēmāh. The word for fury retains the sense of heat. The cup turns that heat into something held and drunk, making the verse’s anger tangible in its image.
ALSO GROWS
ḥammāh: The sun; solar heat
חַמָּה
This related word keeps physical heat audible beneath the verse’s language of fury.
ḥēmāh: Heat, anger, fury
חֵמָה
This is the word naming the cup’s contents, joining fury with the root’s basic sense of heat.
שֹׁלֵחַ
shōlēaḥ
GROWS FROM
שלח
š-l-ḥ
To send forth, dispatch, release, or stretch out.
“send” in this verse is shōlēaḥ. The cup reaches the nations through someone sent by the LORD. The root also carries the sense of release: what is in the hand is sent outward among the nations.
ALSO GROWS
shālīaḥ: An emissary; one who is sent
שָׁלִיחַ
The messenger’s role is contained in the same word-family as the act of sending.
shillēaḥ: Sent away or released
שִׁלֵּחַ
This branch adds the sense of something being let go and sent out from the hand.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures divine judgment as a cup held in a hand, poured out, and consumed.
For a cup is in the hand of the LORD, and the wine foams, full and mixed; he pours from it, but its dregs, all the wicked of the earth, drain and drink.Awake, awake, rise, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the LORD the cup of his burning. You have drunk the dregs of the cup of reeling, and drained them.And he himself drinks from the wine of the seething of God, poured out undiluted into the cup of his swelling. And he is tormented in fire and sulfur before the face of the set-apart messengers, and before the face of the Lamb.THE THREAD
Awake, awake, rise, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the LORD the cup of his burning. You have drunk the dregs of the cup of reeling, and drained them.Isaiah uses the same word for fury in the image of a cup drunk from the LORD’s hand, then shows its dregs being wrung out. The shared root opens the force of Jeremiah’s command: the nations are made to drink the cup, not merely offered a taste.
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