What Does Jeremiah 39:2 Mean?
In the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month, the city was split open.
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
And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the city was broken up.THE KEY
The verb translated “broken up” is baqa, the same verb for the deep bursting open, the sea splitting, and dawn breaking through.
THE MEANING
The verse makes rupture exact: the city is breached, and the day of its breaking remains named. It gives the reader language for a breach as an opening forced into what had been enclosed, without softening its cost.
THE ROOT
וַתִּבָּקַע
vattibbaqa
GROWS FROM
בקע
b-q-ʿ
to split, cleave, or burst open
The city’s boundary is split open with the same root used when the deep’s fountains burst open and when the waters divide. Baqa names the breach itself; what passes through that opening, flood, passage, or dawn, depends on the scene.
ALSO GROWS
nibqe'u: were broken open; burst forth
נִבְקְעוּ
Genesis uses this form for the fountains of the great deep bursting open, showing the same root at the scale of the earth’s foundations.
vayyibbaqe'u: were split; divided
וַיִּבָּקְעוּ
Exodus uses this form for the waters dividing, where a split boundary becomes a passage.
yibbaqa: break forth
יִבָּקַע
Isaiah uses this form for light breaking forth like morning, showing that the same verb can describe dawn opening through darkness.
THE PATTERN
Baqa names a boundary splitting open, while what comes through depends on what the opening releases.
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that very day, all the springs of the great deep were split open, and the windows of heaven were opened.And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD made the sea go back by a strong breath of the east all that night, and made the sea dry ground, and the waters were split.Then your light shall break open like the dawn, and your healing shall sprout quickly; your alignment shall go before you, and the weight of the LORD shall gather you in.THE THREAD
Then the city was split open, and all the men of war fled and went out of the city by night, by way of the gate between the two walls, which is by the king's garden, while the Chaldeans were all around the city; and they went by way of the plain.Jeremiah 52:7 uses the same baqa verb for the city’s breach, then shows its immediate consequence: the men of war flee through the opening by night. The parallel makes the force of this image concrete: bodies moving through a breached boundary.
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