What Does Jeremiah 6:19 Mean?
Hear and respond, O earth. Behold, I am bringing harm upon this people, the fruit of their plan, because they did not bend their ears to my words, and have spurned my instruction.
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
Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it.THE KEY
Here, harm is called the fruit of the people’s thoughts: the consequence arrives carrying the shape of what they have been devising.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks to you now with a severe warning: harm can be the yield of what people devise while refusing God’s words and instruction. The earth is called to hear as rejection and consequence stand in the open.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that rejecting instruction leaves no trace: refusal can bear a consequence that returns as harm.
THE ROOT
פְּרִי
peri
GROWS FROM
פָּרָה
parah
To bear fruit, be fruitful, produce, or increase.
פְּרִי (peri, fruit or yield) belongs to פָּרָה (parah, bear fruit or increase), so the verse pictures the harm as what their designs have produced. The image makes consequence a harvest, not a disconnected arrival.
ALSO GROWS
parah: To bear fruit, be fruitful, or increase.
פָּרָה
The verb names the producing movement behind the noun “fruit.”
peri: Fruit, produce, or yield.
פְּרִי
The coming harm is named as a yield of the people’s designs.
מַחְשְׁבוֹתֵיהֶם
machshevoteyhem
GROWS FROM
חָשַׁב
chashav
To reckon, devise, plan, or form a design.
מַחְשְׁבוֹת (machshevot, thoughts or plans) comes from חָשַׁב (chashav, reckon, devise, or plan), so English “thoughts” can sound more fleeting than this formed design. Beside פְּרִי (peri, fruit or yield), the phrase shows an inward design ripening into an outward consequence.
ALSO GROWS
chashav: To reckon, devise, or plan.
חָשַׁב
The root spans thinking and intentional design, not only passing thoughts.
machashavah: A thought, plan, or design.
מַחֲשָׁבָה
This noun from the same root names the inward design whose fruit the verse describes.
cheshbon: An account or reckoning.
חֶשְׁבּוֹן
This branch keeps the root’s sense of reckoning beneath what English renders as “thoughts.”
רָעָה
ra’ah
GROWS FROM
רָעַע
ra’a
To be bad, act harmfully, or cause injury; the word family includes evil and experienced harm.
רָעָה (ra’ah, evil, harm, or calamity) holds experienced harm and moral badness within the same word family. Here it is what is brought upon the people and what the verse names as the fruit of their designs.
ALSO GROWS
raʿ: Bad or evil.
רַע
This adjective shows the family’s moral sense of what is bad.
ra’ah: Evil, harm, or calamity.
רָעָה
This noun names the harm brought upon the people in the verse.
ra’a: To act badly or cause harm.
רָעַע
The verb carries the family’s sense of harmful action.
THE PATTERN
What is cultivated in a way of life returns as its yield.
Therefore they eat from the fruit of their way, and they are filled with their own counsel.For they sow breath, and they will reap the whirlwind. It has no stalk. The sprout will yield no meal. If it yields, strangers will swallow it up.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
Therefore they eat from the fruit of their way, and they are filled with their own counsel.Jeremiah calls the arriving harm פְּרִי (peri, fruit or yield) of the people’s designs; Proverbs uses the same Hebrew word for the fruit of their own way. What is formed becomes the yield they themselves meet.
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