What Does Jeremiah 48:38 Mean?
There shall be wailing on every rooftop of Moab, and in her streets, for I have broken Moab like a vessel with no delight in it, 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
There shall be lamentation generally upon all the housetops of Moab, and in the streets thereof: for I have broken Moab like a vessel wherein is no pleasure, saith the LORD.THE KEY
The breaking is paired with chephets, desire or delight: Moab becomes a vessel in which no delight is taken.
THE MEANING
The verse puts the reader before a public collapse: lament fills Moab’s rooftops and streets. The LORD names the breaking directly and likens Moab to a vessel in which there is no delight; the image holds the severity of judgment without softening it.
THE ROOT
נִשְׁבַּר
nishbar
GROWS FROM
שבר
to break, smash, or shatter
The verse uses nishbar, “is broken,” from shavar; its branch shever names breakage or ruin, while mishbar can name a breaker or breaking wave. The root ranges from a thing split open to a force that overwhelms, giving Moab’s collapse more weight than a superficial crack.
ALSO GROWS
shever: breakage, fracture, ruin
שֶׁבֶר
The same seed extends physical breaking into the language of ruin, fitting the verse’s sweeping lament.
mishbar: breaker, breaking wave
מִשְׁבָּר
This branch pictures rupture as a force that crashes through, sharpening the image of Moab’s collapse.
חֵפֶץ
chephets
GROWS FROM
חפץ
to desire, delight, or take pleasure in
“no delight in it” in this verse is chephets. Chephets carries the sense of desire or delight, so the vessel is described not only as broken but as one in which no delight is taken. The same root can express delight in someone or something, making its absence part of the judgment’s image.
ALSO GROWS
chafets: desiring, taking delight
חָפֵץ
This verb shows the root as active desire; the verse marks that delight as absent from the vessel.
Hephzibah: my delight is in her
חֶפְצִי־בָהּ
This name uses the same root for delight in Zion, opening the contrast with a vessel in which no delight is found.
THE PATTERN
When a vessel breaks, the rupture exposes its condition or releases what it contains.
And you will say to them, Thus says the LORD of hosts; Even so I will shatter this people and this city, as one shatters a potter's vessel that cannot be healed again. And they will bury them in Tophet, until there is no room to bury.I am forgotten like the dead, out of the heart; I am like a vessel that perishes.And as he was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, reclining at table, there came a woman with an alabaster jar of genuine nard oil, very costly, and she shattered the jar and poured it down over his head.THE THREAD
And you will say to them, Thus says the LORD of hosts; Even so I will shatter this people and this city, as one shatters a potter's vessel that cannot be healed again. And they will bury them in Tophet, until there is no room to bury.Jeremiah 19:11 uses the same root, שבר (shavar, “break”), for the LORD’s act of breaking the people and the city, and it also names a potter’s vessel. That verse makes explicit how irreversible the vessel image of judgment can be.
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