What Does Jeremiah 49:21 Mean?
The earth quakes at the sound of their falling. The cry, its voice is heard in the Sea of Reeds.
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 earth is moved at the noise of their fall, at the cry the noise thereof was heard in the Red sea.THE KEY
The fall has a voice: its sound shakes the earth and carries all the way to the sea.
THE MEANING
A collapse does not stay contained where it begins. The earth is shaken, and the cry carries across the sea; the fall becomes a sound that reaches beyond its source. This verse speaks wherever a rupture sends its impact through people and places far beyond its origin.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a collapse belongs only to the one who falls: its sound can shake and reach far beyond its source.
THE ROOT
קוֹל
qol
GROWS FROM
קול
qol
Sound, voice, or utterance.
The word appears first for the sound of their fall and again for the sound heard at the sea. English uses “noise” for both, while the Hebrew word holds voice and sound together: the collapse has a voice that travels.
ALSO GROWS
qolot: voices, sounds
קוֹלוֹת
The plural keeps many sounds in the same word family, echoing how the fall’s sound becomes a cry that carries outward.
qolam: their voice, their sound
קוֹלָם
This form appears at the verse’s end, making the sound of the fall the voice heard far away.
רָעֲשָׁה
ra'ashah
GROWS FROM
רעש
ra'ash
To shake or quake.
“quakes” in this verse is ra'ashah. The earth does not merely respond with a faint tremor; the verb pictures it shaking. The root brings the physical disturbance into the same scene as the fall’s far-reaching sound.
ALSO GROWS
ra'ash: quake, commotion
רַעַשׁ
The noun names the upheaval contained in the verb’s image of the earth shaking.
hir'ish: to shake, cause to quake
הִרְעִישׁ
This causative form makes explicit the force that turns a disturbance into a shaking.
נִפְלָם
niflam
GROWS FROM
נפל
naphal
To fall, descend, or collapse.
“falling” in this verse is niflam. The fall is not only a downward movement; the same root also names a downfall. Here that collapse has consequences beyond the thing that falls, becoming a sound that shakes and travels.
ALSO GROWS
naphal: to fall
נָפַל
The verb gives the direct action behind “their fall,” the event whose sound opens the verse.
mappalah: downfall, ruin
מַפָּלָה
This noun extends falling into collapse, illuminating the scale of the event whose sound reaches beyond its source.
THE PATTERN
A great collapse can move the earth and send its cry far beyond the place where it begins.
At the sound of Babylon's capture, the earth quakes, and the cry is heard among the nations.Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken loose from its place, in the heat of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of the burning of his anger.whose voice then shook the earth, but now he has promised, saying, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.”THE THREAD
At the sound of Babylon's capture, the earth quakes, and the cry is heard among the nations.Jeremiah 50:46 repeats the pattern of the earth moving at a sound, with a cry heard far away. The shared Hebrew word for sound and voice holds the collapse and its far-reaching report together in both verses.
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