What Does Jeremiah 3:21 Mean?
A voice was heard upon the bare heights, the weeping and pleas of the children of Israel, for they have crooked their way, and they have forgotten the LORD their God.
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
A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications of the children of Israel: for they have perverted their way, and they have forgotten the LORD their God.THE KEY
The verse sets forgetting beside a cry of weeping and supplication: estrangement has not silenced the plea.
THE MEANING
A life can bend away from the LORD until God slips from awareness, while grief still rises as weeping and pleading. Israel’s name, יִשְׂרָאֵל (Yisra’el, “one who strives with God”), carries that struggle in its very sound; here the struggle is voiced openly.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Forgetting the LORD means there can be no voice left to reach toward God.
THE ROOT
שָׁכְחוּ
shakhechu
GROWS FROM
שׁכח
To forget, fail to remember, or let slip from awareness.
“forgotten” in this verse is shakhechu. The Hebrew verb names more than a missing fact: it can describe ceasing to keep someone in mind. The verse places that forgetting beside weeping and entreaty, making the loss of remembrance audible as grief.
ALSO GROWS
shikhḥah: Forgetfulness
שִׁכְחָה
This noun names forgetting as a condition, showing that the verse’s word belongs to a wider language of lost remembrance.
nishkaḥ: Forgotten; one who is forgotten
נִשְׁכָּח
This form uses the same consonants to describe what has fallen from someone’s awareness.
דַּרְכָּם
darkam
GROWS FROM
דרך
To tread or step; by extension, a path or course.
The word for their “way” shares its root with the verb “to tread.” A way is a course shaped by steps, so the verse’s image of a perverted way reaches into the direction a life repeatedly takes.
ALSO GROWS
derekh: Way, path, or road
דֶּרֶךְ
This is the noun used for their course; its root keeps the image of a walked path beneath the English word “way.”
darakh: To tread or step
דָּרַךְ
The verb shares all three root consonants and shows how a path is made by the steps taken along it.
THE PATTERN
Grief over separation can become the spoken turning back toward relationship.
Turn back, O turned-away children, and I will heal your turnings-away. Look, we come to you, for you are the LORD our God.Turn back, Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled in your crookedness.I will rise and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have missed the mark against the heavens and before your face,THE THREAD
Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she would not have compassion on the son of her womb? Even they may forget, but I will not forget you.Jeremiah’s שָׁכְחוּ (shakhechu, “they forgot”) shares the root שׁכח with Isaiah’s repeated “forget.” Isaiah sets human forgetting beside the words “yet will I not forget thee,” letting the same root reveal a striking difference between what people may forget and what God says remains remembered.
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