What Does Jeremiah 9:21 Mean?
For death has climbed up into our windows, and entered our strongholds, to cut off the children from outside, and the young men from the streets.
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
For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets.THE KEY
The word for window is linked to hollowing and piercing, making the opening in the house the path through which death breaches its protection.
THE MEANING
Death enters the protected interior and reaches the children and young men beyond it. The verse speaks where private shelter and public streets no longer divide safety from danger; the violence crosses both.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a protected home can keep death outside is undone here: the danger crosses the very boundary meant to shelter.
THE ROOT
חַלּוֹנֵינוּ
ḥallōnênû
GROWS FROM
חלל
ḥ-l-l
To hollow out, bore through, or pierce.
The word for window is linked to the language of hollowing and piercing. When death enters through the windows, the image makes the opening in the wall the path through which shelter is breached.
ALSO GROWS
ḥālāl: A pierced or slain person.
חָלָל
This branch carries the root’s piercing sense into the human cost of the verse.
ḥālîl: A flute or hollow pipe.
חָלִיל
The hollow tube shares the root’s sense of an opening through a solid form, echoing the window in the wall.
בַּחוּרִים
baḥûrîm
GROWS FROM
בחר
b-ḥ-r
To choose or select; by extension, choice or select.
English hears age and gender in “young men”; Hebrew also echoes the language of choosing and what is choice. The death in this verse reaches not only children but the community’s choice young men.
ALSO GROWS
bāḥar: To choose or select.
בָּחַר
The verb shares the consonantal root of the word for young men, adding an echo of selection to the group being cut down.
bāḥîr: Chosen one or elect.
בְּחִיר
This related form makes the choice/selecting sense explicit beside the verse’s word for young men.
לְהַכְרִית
ləhaḵrît
GROWS FROM
כרת
k-r-t
To cut or sever.
“to cut off” in this verse is ləhaḵrît. Here the verb names the violent removal of children and young men. The same root appears in the expression for cutting a covenant, so it can name a severing that binds as well as one that destroys; here it cuts into the continuity of life.
ALSO GROWS
kārat: To cut or cut off; used in the expression “cut a covenant.”
כָּרַת
The covenant phrase shows the root can describe a cutting that establishes a bond, sharply contrasting with the destruction named here.
kerîtût: A certificate of divorce; a formal severing.
כְּרִיתוּת
This related noun preserves the root’s sense of separation and makes the verse’s cutting off feel like a rupture.
THE PATTERN
When death breaches communal boundaries, it reaches both protected interiors and the vulnerable lives that sustain a people.
In the city they rush, on the wall they run, upon the houses they climb, through the windows they come like a thief.The sword is outside, and the plague and the hunger inside. The one in the field shall die by the sword, and the one in the city, hunger and plague shall eat him.Then Herod, when he perceived that he had been mocked by the wise men, burned with rage, and sent forth and killed all the children who were in Bethlehem and in all its borders, from two years old and under, according to the time he had carefully learned from the wise men.THE THREAD
In the city they rush, on the wall they run, upon the houses they climb, through the windows they come like a thief.Both verses use חלונות (ḥallōnôt, windows): Jeremiah pictures death rising through them, while Joel pictures attackers entering through them like a thief. Joel makes explicit the breach of the household boundary that Jeremiah compresses into one image.
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