What Does Jeremiah 14:4 Mean in the King James?
Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads.
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 Hebrew word for ground shares its consonants with the word for human, so the drought reaches the ground-being through the soil.
THE MEANING
When rain does not come, the ground cracks and the people who work it carry the drought on their bodies. The barren field and the farmers covering their heads show the land’s distress reaching human life. This speaks wherever what sustains people stops arriving.
THE ROOT
הָאֲדָמָה
ha’adamah
GROWS FROM
אדם
אדם (ʾ-d-m) carries the sense of redness; אֲדָמָה names soil or ground.
The consonants אדם link the soil with אָדָם (adam, human), a wordplay made explicit when Genesis describes the human formed from the ground. Here the plowmen’s distress belongs to the same earth they cultivate; the land is not merely a backdrop to their lives.
ALSO GROWS
adam: Human, person
אָדָם
It shares the consonants אדם with אֲדָמָה, linking human life to the soil.
adom: Red
אָדֹם
It shares the same consonants and carries the root’s association with redness into the word-family of the ground.
רֹאשָׁם
rosham
GROWS FROM
ראש
רֹאשׁ (rosh) means head, top, or foremost.
The word for the farmers’ heads shares its consonants with רֵאשִׁית (reshit, beginning or first). The covered heads make their response visible in the body, while the root’s wider range connects the head with what is foremost.
ALSO GROWS
rosh: Head, top, chief
רֹאשׁ
It is the singular form in the same root-family as the farmers’ heads.
reshit: Beginning, first
רֵאשִׁית
It shares the root’s consonants and extends the head’s sense of what is foremost into the idea of a beginning.
THE PATTERN
When creation’s needed provision is absent, its distress reaches both the land and the lives that depend on it.
And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered.For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.THE THREAD
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.Jeremiah’s הָאֲדָמָה (ha’adamah, ground) shares its consonants with אָדָם (adam, human), and Genesis places that wordplay in the human formed from the ground. The drought in Jeremiah’s soil reaches the people who cultivate it because their lives are bound to the same earth.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us