What Does Jeremiah 27:2 Mean?
Thus says the LORD to me, Make for yourself bonds and yokes, and put them on your neck.
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
Thus saith the LORD to me; Make thee bonds and yokes, and put them upon thy neck,THE KEY
The yoke turns domination from an abstraction into weight carried on the neck.
THE MEANING
The command makes restraint visible: bonds and a yoke are placed where their pressure can be seen and felt. The reader encounters imposed rule as something borne by a body, not just named in words.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the idea that domination is only an abstract arrangement: its mark is a weight laid across the neck.
THE ROOT
מֹסְרוֹת
mōserōt
GROWS FROM
אָסַר
ʾ-s-r
To bind, tie, or imprison.
This root names both the restraint and the person held by it. English separates the bonds from the captive, while the Hebrew word family holds them together as parts of the same condition.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāsîr: Captive, prisoner.
אָסִיר
The same root names the person who is bound, joining the object in this verse to the state it imposes.
ʾāsūr: Bound, restricted, or forbidden.
אָסוּר
The root also describes a condition of restriction, showing how a physical bond can mark a wider limit on movement.
מֹטוֹת
mōṭōt
GROWS FROM
מוּט
m-w-ṭ
To totter, slip, or be shaken.
“yokes” in this verse is mōṭōt. The word for the yoke-bar belongs to a root associated with tottering and being shaken. Its sound-family lets the object carry an added sense of destabilizing weight, beyond the wood or bar placed across the neck.
ALSO GROWS
mōṭāh: Yoke-bar.
מוֹטָה
This singular form names the bar placed across the neck; the verse’s plural makes the burden concrete.
yimmōṭ: He will totter or be shaken.
יִמּוֹט
The related verb brings out the instability associated with the yoke’s root.
THE PATTERN
A prophetic warning becomes visible when it is enacted through a body or a tangible object.
Before their eyes you shall lift it upon your shoulder, and in the dark you shall lift it. You shall cover your face, so that you do not see the earth. For I have set you as a sign to the house of Israel.And you will say to them, Thus says the LORD of hosts; Even so I will shatter this people and this city, as one shatters a potter's vessel that cannot be healed again. And they will bury them in Tophet, until there is no room to bury.And when he came to us, he lifted Paul's belt, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, Thus says the Set-Apart Breath, so will the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man whose belt this is, and will hand him over into the hands of the nations.THE THREAD
Let us tear their bonds apart, and throw their cords off us.The Hebrew word translated “bands” here shares the root אָסַר (ʾ-s-r), meaning “to bind,” with Jeremiah’s “bonds.” Psalm 2:3 speaks of throwing off restraint; Jeremiah’s sign places that same restraint on the neck for all to see.
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