What Does Jeremiah 52:6 Mean?
In the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month, the famine gripped the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land.
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
And in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month, the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land.THE KEY
The famine “grew strong” in the Hebrew: hunger is not just severe here; it has become the city’s condition, and bread is gone.
THE MEANING
When a city’s shared provision fails, hunger reaches beyond one body; the absence falls on the people together. The words leave the fact uncovered: there is no bread.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that hunger is only private misfortune: this verse locates the absence across the city and among its people.
THE ROOT
וַיֶּחֱזַק
vayyeḥĕzaq
GROWS FROM
חזק
To be strong or firm, to strengthen, to hold fast.
“gripped” in this verse is vayyeḥĕzaq. The Hebrew says the famine grew strong in the city. The word makes scarcity feel like a force gaining hold, not merely a condition measured as severe.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāzāq: Strong, firm.
חָזָק
The same root gives the famine its force: it has become strong within the city.
heḥĕzīq: To hold fast, grasp, or strengthen.
הֶחֱזִיק
This branch gives a sense of something taking hold, echoing how the famine presses upon the city.
הָרָעָב
hā-rāʿāb
GROWS FROM
רעב
To be hungry.
The word for famine grows from the same root used for being hungry. Hebrew keeps the bodily hunger inside the larger crisis: the famine of the city is felt in the people’s bodies.
ALSO GROWS
rāʿēb: Hungry; to be hungry.
רָעֵב
The root connects the citywide famine to the immediate bodily experience of hunger.
rāʿāb: Hunger or famine.
רָעָב
This noun names hunger as a condition shared across the city.
לֶחֶם
leḥem
GROWS FROM
לחם
Bread or food; its consonants also occur in a separate Hebrew root meaning to fight.
The consonants of leḥem (bread) echo those of lāḥam (fight) and milḥāmāh (battle), words usually treated as a distinct family, so this is not a certain etymological link. The sound still places sustenance beside struggle: the verse names what is missing when hunger takes hold.
ALSO GROWS
Bēt Leḥem: Bethlehem; house of bread.
בֵּית לֶחֶם
The compound preserves leḥem as bread, making the absence named here especially concrete.
lāḥam: To fight; a separate root with the same consonants.
לָחַם
This is a consonant echo rather than a proven derivation; it lets bread’s absence stand beside the struggle for survival.
THE PATTERN
Bread is the tangible measure by which Scripture names a community’s daily sustenance.
And there was no bread in all the land, for the hunger was very heavy, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan fainted from before the face of the hunger.And on the ninth day of the fourth month the hunger gripped the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land.Give us today our bread for the coming day.THE THREAD
And there was no bread in all the land, for the hunger was very heavy, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan fainted from before the face of the hunger.Genesis uses the same Hebrew anchors: רָעָב (rāʿāb, famine) and לֶחֶם (leḥem, bread). There the lack spreads across a whole land; here it has pressed into a city until bread is absent for its people.
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