What Does Jeremiah 29:6 Mean?
Take wives, and bear sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters, and multiply there and not shrink.
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
Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished.THE KEY
The place that feels like an interruption is still “there”, a place where life is commanded to multiply.
THE MEANING
You hear a communal charge to form households and raise children in the place where you are. The repeated “there” refuses to make location a condition for life: the community grows in that very place instead of becoming fewer. The verse speaks into displacement without calling it the end of its story.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that life can only begin again after returning to the right place; the verse names “there” as a place where a community can multiply.
THE ROOT
וּרְבוּ
urevu
GROWS FROM
רבה
rabah
Increase, become many.
English “increased” can sound like a statistic; the Hebrew says, “be many.” The same root also gives a word for abundance, so the command reaches beyond mere survival: communal life becomes numerous there.
ALSO GROWS
rov: Abundance, multitude.
רֹב
This branch names the abundance toward which “be many” points.
hirbah: Increased, made numerous.
הִרְבָּה
This form shows the same root describing an increase brought about, echoing the verse’s movement toward more life.
תִּמְעָטוּ
tim'atu
GROWS FROM
מעט
ma'at
Become few or small; lessen.
“not shrink” in this verse is tim'atu. English “diminished” can sound as though an outside hand reduces the people; the Hebrew verb also carries the sense of becoming few. Set against “be many,” it names two opposing communal directions in the same place.
ALSO GROWS
me'at: A little; few.
מְעַט
This branch gives the smallness that the verse sets against becoming many.
him'it: Diminished, made fewer.
הִמְעִיט
This form shows the root describing a reduction in number, the direction the verse rejects.
THE PATTERN
Life is not postponed until conditions are ideal; it takes root and multiplies in the place it occupies.
Build houses and settle in them, and plant gardens and eat their fruit.But the more they bent them low, the more they multiplied and burst forth. And they recoiled from the face of the children of Israel.And the word of God grew, and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly, and a great crowd of the priests heard and responded by leaning their weight.THE THREAD
But the more they bent them low, the more they multiplied and burst forth. And they recoiled from the face of the children of Israel.“Multiplied” in Exodus 1:12 comes from the same Hebrew root as “increased” here. The shared root links growth to the very setting that presses against it: pressure is named, but it does not get the final word over the community becoming many.
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