What Does Jeremiah 48:46 Mean?
Woe to you, Moab. The people of Chemosh has perished, for your sons have gone into captivity, and your daughters into captivity.
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
Woe be unto thee, O Moab! the people of Chemosh perisheth: for thy sons are taken captives, and thy daughters captives.THE KEY
Moab’s collapse is both a people perishing and its next generation carried away: the verse joins loss to captivity.
THE MEANING
The verse gives communal devastation a human shape: the people perish, and their sons and daughters are taken captive. It speaks plainly about the loss of a people and the capture of its future.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It overturns the idea that a people’s ruin is only a matter of borders or rulers; the verse names children carried away as part of the loss.
THE ROOT
אָבַד
ʾābad
GROWS FROM
אבד
To perish, be lost, or lose the way
“perished” in this verse is ʾābad. The root holds perishing and being lost together. The verse names more than defeat: it names a people slipping toward disappearance, while its next generation is carried away.
ALSO GROWS
ʾoved: Perishing; lost
אֹבֵד
In Deuteronomy 26:5, the phrase “ready to perish” uses this form, echoing the precarious state named for Moab’s people.
ʾavedah: A lost thing; something missing
אֲבֵדָה
This branch makes the root’s language of loss concrete: what perishes is also what becomes absent.
שְׁבִי
shevi
GROWS FROM
שׁבה
To take captive; capture
The root gives both capture and captivity a shared word family. Sons and daughters are named within the same captivity, extending the loss across the next generation.
ALSO GROWS
shavah: To take captive
שָׁבָה
The act of taking belongs to the same root family as the captivity into which Moab’s children are carried.
shevi: Captivity
שְׁבִי
The sons are taken into this captivity, while the daughters are likewise named in captivity; the paired lines hold both within the same loss.
THE PATTERN
A people’s undoing becomes visible in who is carried away from it.
Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, and your eyes shall see and run out toward them all the day long, and there shall be no strength in your hand.Those who press her have become the head, and her enemies are at ease, for the LORD has pained her for the multitude of her rebellions. Her little ones go into captivity before the pressing one.They will fall by the mouth of the sword, and be led away captive into all the nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled by the nations until the seasons of the nations are filled.THE THREAD
And you answer and say before the LORD your God, An Aramean who had lost his way was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and lived there as a sojourner with a handful of them, and there became a nation, great, mighty, and numerous.“Ready to perish” uses אָבֵד (ʾoved, “perishing” or “lost”), from the same root as “perisheth” in Jeremiah. Here the root marks an ancestor at the edge of loss as the verse names a people arising from that starting point, opening a sharp echo beside Moab’s threatened disappearance.
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