What Does Jeremiah 10:3 Mean in the King James?
For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The custom and its object share one origin: people shape and sustain what the forest did not make for itself.
THE MEANING
The verse calls the people’s custom vaporous, then traces its object to a tree cut from the forest and shaped by a worker’s hands. Its form remains visibly human-made, however established the practice around it becomes.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that repetition or skilled making can give an object divine life or authority.
THE ROOT
הֶבֶל
hevel
GROWS FROM
הבל
Vapor; insubstantiality, something fleeting.
“vain” in this verse is hevel. הֶבֶל (hevel, vapor or insubstantiality) names what cannot hold lasting substance. The verse places that word over the people’s customs, so the judgment reaches beyond a particular object to the practice that gives it weight.
ALSO GROWS
hevel: Vapor; vanity or emptiness.
הֶבֶל
This is the word rendered vain in the verse, making the custom seem as insubstantial as vapor.
havel havalim: Vapor of vapors; vanity of vanities.
הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים
The repeated form intensifies the same image of what cannot be made lasting.
Hevel: Hevel, the Hebrew name rendered Abel, sharing the form of the word for vapor.
הֶבֶל
The shared form shows how the same Hebrew word can name a person and evoke fleetingness.
חֻקּוֹת
chuqqot
GROWS FROM
חקק
To engrave or inscribe; to mark out or prescribe.
The word for customs comes from the חקק (chaqaq, engrave or inscribe) family, whose branches include what is prescribed or fixed. The verse sets this marked practice beside a tree physically cut from the forest: the custom and its object are both shown in forms people shape.
ALSO GROWS
chaqaq: To engrave or inscribe.
חָקַק
It reveals the image of a custom as something marked into a people’s practice.
choq: A statute, prescribed measure, or fixed portion.
חֹק
It shows how the root extends from marking to what is set or prescribed.
chuqqah: An ordinance or established custom.
חֻקָּה
This related form brings the root directly back to the practice named in the verse.
כָּרְתוּ
karatu
GROWS FROM
כרת
To cut, sever, or cut down.
“cutteth” in this verse is karatu. כרת (karat, cut or sever) makes the tree’s removal a concrete act rather than an abstract description. The same verb appears in the expression כָּרַת בְּרִית (karat berit, cut a covenant); that echo does not make this a covenant, but it shows how cutting can also mark a binding human arrangement.
ALSO GROWS
karat: To cut or cut down.
כָּרַת
This is the action by which the tree leaves the forest.
karat berit: To make a covenant, literally to cut a covenant.
כָּרַת בְּרִית
The same verb links a physical cut with an idiom for making a binding agreement.
nikhrat: To be cut off or severed.
נִכְרַת
This form keeps the root’s sense of separation visible in the tree’s removal from the forest.
THE PATTERN
What human hands shape does not acquire divine life merely because custom gives it sacred weight.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed.As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one.THE THREAD
The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man; that it may remain in the house.Jeremiah’s חָרָשׁ (charash, craftsman) reappears in Isaiah as the carpenter, חָרָשׁ (charash, craftsman). Isaiah lists the tools and measurements by which the worker gives wood its shape, making the human origin of the object visible.
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