What Does Jeremiah 9:18 Mean?
Let them hurry, and lift up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids drip with waters.
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 let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “eye” also means “spring,” so grief pours from the face like water from its source.
THE MEANING
This verse meets you where sorrow reaches the body: the lament rises aloud, and your eyes become a source whose waters run down. Grief appears here as a voice and a visible flow.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that grief must stay composed and private; here lament is summoned and tears are part of the truth.
THE ROOT
עֵינֵינוּ
ʿênênû
GROWS FROM
עין
ʿayin
Eye; the same Hebrew word also means a spring or source of water.
English divides eye and spring into unrelated images, but Hebrew uses עַיִן for both. Here, the tears flow from eyes that also evoke water-sources, and the verse’s repeated flow completes that image.
ALSO GROWS
maʿyan: spring, fountain
מַעְיָן
It carries the עין source-image into a word for spring, making the eye and water-source linguistically kin.
ʿeinot: springs, fountains
עֵינוֹת
The plural keeps the source meaning in the same word-family, echoing the waters flowing from the eyes.
יִזְּלוּ
yizzəlû
GROWS FROM
נזל
n-z-l
To flow, trickle, or run down.
“drip” in this verse is yizzəlû. The Hebrew verb pictures water in motion: the eyelids’ waters flow down. Beside עין, “eye” and “spring,” it makes lament feel like a source that keeps moving.
ALSO GROWS
nāzal: to flow, drip, or run down
נָזַל
This is the base verb behind the flowing waters in the verse.
nōzēl: flowing; a fluid or liquid
נוֹזֵל
The same root names what flows, tying the verb to the water in the verse’s image.
THE PATTERN
In scripture, grief takes bodily form: lament is voiced and sorrow flows as tears.
I am spent with my groaning; all the night I make my bed swim; I melt my couch with my tears.Their heart cries out to the Lord. O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears come down like a stream day and night. Give yourself no rest, and let the daughter of your eye not grow still.And when he drew near, perceiving the city, he wept over it.THE THREAD
Passing through the valley of weeping, they make it a spring. The early rain also wraps itself in blessings.The word translated “a well” is מַעְיָן (maʿyan), from the עין word-family that also names an eye. That shared root opens Jeremiah’s tears as springs: a valley becomes a water-source, and so does the face.
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