What Does Judges 14:14 Mean?
And he said to them, Out of the eater came food, and out of the strong came sweetness. And they could not tell the riddle in three days.
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 he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days expound the riddle.THE KEY
The Hebrew root for “eater” also forms the word for “food,” making the devourer itself the source of nourishment.
THE MEANING
The riddle turns appetite and strength around: food comes from the eater, and sweetness comes from what is strong. What appears able only to consume or overpower can hold an unexpected source of nourishment and delight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It loosens the belief that what has the power to consume can only destroy, or that strength can produce only harm.
THE ROOT
הָאֹכֵל
hāʾōkhēl
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-kh-l
To eat, consume.
The same three consonants form both “eater” and “food.” Hebrew keeps the consumer and what is consumed in one word-family, so the riddle’s reversal is embedded in its words: the eater becomes a source of food.
ALSO GROWS
ʾōkhēl: One who eats.
אָכֵל
This is the figure from whom the food unexpectedly comes.
maʾăkhāl: Something eaten; food.
מַאֲכָל
It shares the root of “eater,” joining consumer and nourishment in the same word-family.
יָצָא
yāṣāʾ
GROWS FROM
יצא
y-ts-ʾ
To go out, come forth, emerge.
“came” in this verse is yāṣāʾ. The same verb describes food coming from the eater and sweetness from the strong. Its repetition makes emergence the riddle’s central movement: what appears inside a source comes out of it unexpectedly.
ALSO GROWS
yāṣāʾ: Went out, came forth.
יָצָא
This is the repeated verb that gives both halves the same movement of emergence.
mōṣāʾ: A way out or point of emergence.
מוֹצָא
This related form echoes the verse’s focus on where something comes out.
THE PATTERN
What seems to consume or harden can become the source from which nourishment or life emerges.
He sets him riding on the heights of the earth, and he eats the sprouting of the fields; he makes him suckle honey from the crag, and oil from the flint rock.As for you, you planned evil against me, but God planned it for good, to make it as it is this day, to keep a great people alive.Truly, truly, I say to you. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.THE THREAD
For as the rain comes down, and the snow from the heavens, and does not return there, but drenches the earth, and makes it bear and sprout, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater.Isaiah’s לָאֹכֵל (laʾokhel, “for the eater”) shares the אכל root with “eater” and “food” in Judges. Isaiah shows the earth producing bread for the eater; Judges turns the relation around, making the eater itself the surprising source of food.
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