What Does Jeremiah 51:13 Mean?
O you who settle upon many waters, abundant in storehouses, your end has come, the cubit of your gain.
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
O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures, thine end is come, and the measure of thy covetousness.THE KEY
Your abundance does not enlarge your horizon forever: the gain you gather already has a measure and an end.
THE MEANING
You can be surrounded by many waters and filled with stores, yet neither abundance makes your dwelling permanent. Your gain has a measure, and its limit is arriving.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this verse undoes is that having more makes your place secure; wealth has a measure and cannot keep the end from arriving.
THE ROOT
בִּצְעֵךְ
bitse'ekh
GROWS FROM
בצע
b-ṣ-ʿ
To cut off or break off; the related noun means gain or profit, often unjust gain.
Here covetousness is your gain or profit, rather than a free-floating desire. The root’s cutting-off sense adds an edge to the verse: the gain sits beside an arriving end as something finite, not endless security.
ALSO GROWS
betsaʿ: Gain or profit, often unjust gain.
בֶּצַע
This noun names the profit translated as covetousness in the verse.
batsaʿ: To cut off or break off.
בָּצַע
This verbal branch brings a cutting-off resonance beside the declaration that the end has come.
שֹׁכֶנֶת
shokhenet
GROWS FROM
שכן
sh-k-n
To settle or dwell.
“settle” in this verse is shokhenet. The Hebrew word for dwelling shares its root with mishkan, a dwelling place. Your settled place is named alongside waters and treasures, but the verse gives no guarantee that abundance makes it permanent.
ALSO GROWS
shakan: To dwell or settle.
שָׁכַן
This is the verb beneath the verse’s description of dwelling.
mishkan: Dwelling place, tabernacle.
מִשְׁכָּן
The shared root links this dwelling to the broader idea of a place where something settles.
THE PATTERN
Accumulated wealth cannot make a dwelling permanent or secure its possessor from loss.
There is a sickening harm I have seen under the sun, wealth guarded for its owners to their harm.For in his dying he takes nothing, and his weight does not go down after him.But God said to him, Mindless one, this night your living soul will be demanded back from you. Then whose will those things be that you have made ready?THE THREAD
For from the small of them even to the great of them, every one cuts for gain; and from the prophet even to the priest, every one works a lie.The Hebrew word-family behind “covetousness” names gain or profit in both verses. Read together, they show how a life centered on gain meets its measure in the very thing it has gathered.
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