What Does Jeremiah 5:8 Mean?
They were like well-watered horses at dawn, each one neighing after his neighbor’s wife.
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 were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.THE KEY
The appetite is already full: what has been fed now surges after someone else’s wife.
THE MEANING
You hear desire rendered as a fed horse’s neigh, directed toward a neighbor’s wife. The animal image exposes appetite that has moved beyond private sensation into pursuit of another person’s spouse.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that desire stays innocent while it treats another person’s spouse as its target; here, appetite is already enacted as pursuit.
THE ROOT
יִצְהָלוּ
yits’halu
GROWS FROM
צהל
ts-h-l
to cry aloud, neigh, or exult
“neighing” in this verse is yits’halu. The verb carries both an animal’s neigh and a human cry of exultation. Here it makes desire audible and forceful: the horses’ appetite is expressed as a cry directed toward another’s wife.
ALSO GROWS
tsahali: Cry out; exult.
צָהֳלִי
Isaiah uses this form for Zion’s cry, showing that the same root can voice human exultation as well as an animal’s neigh.
tsohel: Crying out or neighing.
צֹהֵל
This participle keeps the root’s cry audible as an ongoing action, matching the verse’s image of appetite breaking into pursuit.
מְיֻזָּנִים
meyuzzanim
GROWS FROM
זון
z-w-n
to feed or nourish
The image begins with horses that have been fed, not with bodies made weak by want. The root connects their fullness to nourishment itself, making the verse’s movement from feeding to pursuing desire especially stark.
ALSO GROWS
mazon: Food or nourishment.
מָזוֹן
This noun makes the root’s feeding sense concrete: the horses’ appetite follows a scene of nourishment.
zan: Feeding or nourishing.
זָן
This active form keeps the root’s action visible; the horses’ strength is presented as something sustained by feeding.
THE PATTERN
Desire becomes a breach when it turns another person’s spouse into an object of pursuit.
You shall not desire your neighbor's house. You shall not desire your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to crave her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.But each one is tested by his own craving, dragged out and lured.THE THREAD
Ring out and shout, you who settle in Zion, for great is the Set-Apart One of Israel within you.The word translated “neighed” comes from צהל, the same root Isaiah uses for “Cry out” to Zion. The English verbs split a shared cry into animal appetite here and joyful exultation there.
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