What Does Jeremiah 46:23 Mean?
They shall cut down her forest, declares the LORD, though it cannot be searched out; for they have multiplied beyond the locusts, and cannot be counted.
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
They shall cut down her forest, saith the LORD, though it cannot be searched; because they are more than the grasshoppers, and are innumerable.THE KEY
The verse sets an unsearchable forest against an uncountable swarm, and the cutting still happens.
THE MEANING
A forest can be too dense to search and still be cut down by a multitude beyond even the locusts and beyond counting. The verse holds the violence plainly: a force advances where no measure can contain it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Being impossible to fully survey does not make something safe from destruction; the forest’s unsearchability does not prevent it from being cut down.
THE ROOT
רַבּוּ
rabu
GROWS FROM
רבה
To increase, become many, or multiply.
“the locusts; they have multiplied beyond” in this verse is rabu. The word for “they are many” shares its root with the word for “locust.” The swarm is abundance made visible, and the verse says the attacking multitude exceeds even that image of multiplication.
ALSO GROWS
arbeh: Locust
אַרְבֶּה
The verse’s image of the locust carries the same seed of multiplying abundance as “they are many.”
rav: Many, great, or abundant
רַב
This familiar branch makes the root’s movement from increase to multitude audible in the verse.
מִסְפָּר
mispar
GROWS FROM
ספר
To count, recount, or tell.
“cannot be counted” in this verse is mispar. The verse says there is no מִסְפָּר (mispar), no count, for the swarm. This root also gives words for recounting and for a book or scroll: the multitude escapes both the tally and the telling that would make it comprehensible.
ALSO GROWS
saphar: Count, recount, or tell
סָפַר
The swarm exceeds the act of counting that would give its size a boundary.
sefer: Book or scroll
סֵפֶר
The shared root links number with what can be told or recorded; here the multitude resists that measure.
יֵחָקֵר
yechaqer
GROWS FROM
חקר
To search out, investigate, or probe.
“searched” in this verse is yechaqer. The forest is described as beyond חקר (chaqar), beyond searching out. Set beside the swarm’s lack of number, the verse gives two different limits, one cannot be surveyed, the other cannot be counted, while neither stops the cutting.
ALSO GROWS
chaqar: Search or investigate
חָקַר
This verb names the probing the forest exceeds.
ḥeqer: Search, investigation, or inquiry
חֵקֶר
The noun keeps the same idea of probing a thing to its limits, a limit the verse says the forest surpasses.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures an overwhelming multitude as a swarm whose abundance becomes a force of destruction.
For they covered the eye of the whole land, so that it went dark. They ate all the grass of the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left, and no green remained in the trees, or in the grass of the field, through all the land of Egypt.For they came up with their livestock and their tents, and they came like locusts for multitude, for both they and their camels were without number, and they entered the land to ruin it.And locusts come out of the smoke upon the earth, and to them is given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.THE THREAD
For they came up with their livestock and their tents, and they came like locusts for multitude, for both they and their camels were without number, and they entered the land to ruin it.Judges pairs the grasshopper image with a multitude “without number,” echoing Jeremiah’s locusts and numberlessness. The shared abundance language makes the swarm itself the measure of the force advancing on the land.
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