What Does Jeremiah 4:26 Mean?
I see, and there, the orchard is a wilderness, and all its cities are torn down from the face of the LORD, from the face of the burning of his anger.
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
I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the LORD, and by his fierce anger.THE KEY
The Hebrew names this devastation as the heat of the LORD’s nostrils: even fertile land and cities collapse before it.
THE MEANING
The verse presents the LORD’s anger as a force that turns a fruitful place into wilderness and tears down its cities. Fertility and built order both stand exposed before that heat.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that fertile land and strong cities guarantee safety; here both collapse before the LORD’s presence and anger.
THE ROOT
נִתְּצוּ
nittetsu
GROWS FROM
נתץ
נתץ (natats): to tear down or demolish.
The verb names the cities as torn down, making their ruin an act of dismantling rather than mere abandonment. The same root carries that force in related forms for tearing down and demolition.
ALSO GROWS
natats: to tear down, demolish
נָתַץ
This form makes explicit the destructive action behind the cities’ ruin.
netitsah: demolition, the act of tearing down
נְתִיצָה
This noun preserves the same root for the dismantling the verse says the cities undergo.
אַפּוֹ
appō
GROWS FROM
אַף
אַף (af): nose or nostril; also anger and heat, with the bodily image of flaring nostrils.
The phrase literally evokes the heat of the LORD’s nose, giving anger a bodily image of nostrils flaring. The same nose-word appears in the Hebrew idiom often rendered “slow to anger,” literally “slow to flare.”
ALSO GROWS
af: nose; anger or heat
אַף
This is the word behind “his anger,” carrying the physical image of a flared nostril into the verse.
appayim: nostrils; anger in the idiom אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם (erekh appayim), “slow to flare”
אַפַּיִם
The plural form links anger to the nostrils and gives the verse’s fierce heat a bodily counterpart.
THE PATTERN
Divine judgment can strip cultivated land and built shelter down to exposed ruin.
Behold, the LORD empties the earth and strips it bare, and crooks its face, and scatters those who settle in it.And they say to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall upon us, and hide us from the face of the one seated upon the throne, and from the burning anger of the Lamb.THE THREAD
And the LORD passed by before his face, and called out, The LORD, The LORD God, compassionate and full of favor, slow to flare, abounding in faithful love and truth,Jeremiah’s “heat of his nostrils” and Exodus’s “longsuffering” share the Hebrew nose-word אַף / אַפַּיִם (af / appayim). One verse pictures the flare that brings ruin; the other describes the LORD as slow to flare.
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