What Does Jeremiah 29:17 Mean?
Thus says the LORD of hosts. Behold, I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and I will make them like rotten figs, so evil that they cannot be eaten.
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 of hosts; Behold, I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make them like vile figs, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil.THE KEY
In Hebrew, the figs are called “bad” and cannot be eaten “because of badness”, one root makes their rejection the visible image of the people’s condition.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now without softening its violence: sword, famine, and pestilence are sent upon them, and they are made like fruit no one can eat. Its image holds the judgment and the people’s ruined condition in the same frame.
THE ROOT
רָעוֹת
raʿot
GROWS FROM
רעע
To be bad, harmful, or evil.
“vile ... evil” in this verse is raʿot. The KJV’s “vile” and “evil” render forms from one Hebrew word family: the figs are bad, and they are not eaten because of badness. The text makes their inedibility the outward sign of the condition it names.
ALSO GROWS
raʿ: Bad, evil.
רַע
This adjective names the bad figs and connects their condition to the same root rendered “evil.”
rōaʿ: Badness, evil.
רֹעַ
This noun appears in the phrase “because of badness,” explaining why the figs cannot be eaten.
מְשַׁלֵּחַ
meshallēaḥ
GROWS FROM
שלח
Send, send forth; in some contexts, let go or release.
“send” in this verse is meshallēaḥ. The verb is an act of dispatch: the sword, famine, and pestilence are its direct objects, so the sending here lands as calamity. Its range also includes sending away or release, but the objects named here keep the verse’s force unmistakably severe.
ALSO GROWS
shilluach: Sending away, release, or dispatch.
שִׁלּוּחַ
This branch shows how the same root can describe sending away or letting go.
Shiloach: Siloam; the sent waters.
שִׁלֹחַ
This name carries the same root of sending; here, by contrast, the verse names sword, famine, and pestilence as what is sent.
THE PATTERN
Scripture depicts divine judgment through bodily calamities whose damage can be seen and felt.
For thus says the Lord GOD, How much more when I send my four harmful judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the hunger, and the beast of harm, and the plague, to cut off from it man and beast?And I see, and look, a grass-green horse, and the name of the one seated upon it is Death, and Hades follows with him. And power is given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
And like the spoiled figs, which cannot be eaten, so spoiled are they. For thus says the LORD, so will I give Zedekiah king of Judah, and his princes, and the remnant of Jerusalem, those who remain in this land, and those who settle in the land of Egypt.Jeremiah 24:8 repeats the inedible-fig image and names Zedekiah, his princes, and the remaining people as its referents. The Hebrew again places forms from the same bad/evil root beside the inability to eat, showing how Jeremiah 29:17’s split English terms belong to one tightly joined image.
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