What Does Jeremiah 48:25 Mean?
The horn of Moab is cut off, and his arm is broken, says the LORD.
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
The horn of Moab is cut off, and his arm is broken, saith the LORD.THE KEY
The horn and arm turn Moab’s power into a body, and both its outward reach and its ability to act are severed.
THE MEANING
The verse presents Moab’s power as a horn that projects and an arm that acts; both are cut off or broken by the LORD’s decree. What once extended its strength can no longer reach or act. As you read, the verse exposes visible power as something that can be brought to an end.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that visible strength is self-sustaining and beyond interruption: Moab’s reach is cut off and its capacity to act is broken.
THE ROOT
קֶרֶן
qeren
GROWS FROM
קרן
q-r-n
Horn; the root also forms a verb for sending out rays.
“horn” in this verse is qeren. The Hebrew qeren shares its consonants with qaran, “to shine” or “send out rays”: both images extend outward from a center. Moab’s power is pictured as projecting reach, and its cutting off ends that reach.
ALSO GROWS
qeren: Horn; also a biblical image of strength or raised power.
קֶרֶן
This is the verse’s image for Moab’s power as something that projects outward.
qaran: To shine or send out rays.
קָרַן
This related form adds the image of something extending outward from a source, like the horn’s projection.
נִשְׁבָּרָה
nishberah
GROWS FROM
שבר
sh-b-r
To break or shatter.
The arm is broken with the root שבר, which also forms shever, “ruin” or “calamity.” The Hebrew word family lets an injury to the arm name a wider collapse of power.
ALSO GROWS
shavar: To break or shatter.
שָׁבַר
The word in the verse comes from this root, naming the arm’s fracture.
shever: A break, ruin, or calamity.
שֶׁבֶר
This branch shows how the root can describe not just a broken limb but a state of ruin.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures power as a horn or arm that can be lifted, broken, or cut away.
All the horns of the wicked I cut off; but the horns of the aligned one are lifted high.Son of man, I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and, behold, it shall not be bound up, to set healing upon it, to put a roller to bind it, to make it firm to grasp the sword.And has raised up a horn of deliverance for us in the house of his servant David;THE THREAD
For the arms of the wicked will be broken, but the LORD props up the aligned.This verse uses the same image of the arm and the same root, שבר, for breaking. The echo makes Jeremiah’s image part of a recurring scriptural picture of power losing its capacity to act.
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