What Does Jeremiah 25:15 Mean in the King James?
For thus saith the LORD God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it.
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 cup makes fury something held, carried, and made to enter the nations themselves.
THE MEANING
Here, divine fury is not an abstraction: it is a cup in the LORD’s hand, carried by the one he sends and drunk by every nation named. Judgment passes from the hand into the body; the nations receive its full force as something they must drink.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a nation’s power or distance places it beyond judgment is undone here: the verse names all the nations as drinkers of the cup.
THE ROOT
וְהִשְׁקִיתָה
we-hishqîtāh
GROWS FROM
שקה
š-q-h
To give drink, water, or irrigate; in this causative form, to make someone drink.
“cause ... to drink” in this verse is we-hishqîtāh. The verb makes the messenger an agent of the drinking: he does not merely present the cup; he causes the nations to take it in. The same root can describe watering, an act that sustains life, while here it carries the cup of fury.
ALSO GROWS
shaqah: To give drink, water, or irrigate
שָׁקָה
The root’s ordinary image of watering gives the forced drinking in this verse its stark physical weight.
mashqeh: A drink or beverage; a cupbearer
מַשְׁקֶה
The word can name both what is drunk and the one who serves it, echoing the verse’s cup and the messenger who carries it.
הַחֵמָה
ha-ḥēmāh
GROWS FROM
חמה
ḥ-m-h
Heat; to be hot or grow hot.
The word for fury retains the sense of heat. The cup turns that heat into something held and drunk, making the verse’s anger tangible in its image.
ALSO GROWS
ḥammāh: The sun; solar heat
חַמָּה
This related word keeps physical heat audible beneath the verse’s language of fury.
ḥēmāh: Heat, anger, fury
חֵמָה
This is the word naming the cup’s contents, joining fury with the root’s basic sense of heat.
שֹׁלֵחַ
shōlēaḥ
GROWS FROM
שלח
š-l-ḥ
To send forth, dispatch, release, or stretch out.
“send” in this verse is shōlēaḥ. The cup reaches the nations through someone sent by the LORD. The root also carries the sense of release: what is in the hand is sent outward among the nations.
ALSO GROWS
shālīaḥ: An emissary; one who is sent
שָׁלִיחַ
The messenger’s role is contained in the same word-family as the act of sending.
shillēaḥ: Sent away or released
שִׁלֵּחַ
This branch adds the sense of something being let go and sent out from the hand.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures divine judgment as a cup held in a hand, poured out, and consumed.
For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is full of mixture; and he poureth out of the same: but the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drink them.Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:THE THREAD
Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.Isaiah uses the same word for fury in the image of a cup drunk from the LORD’s hand, then shows its dregs being wrung out. The shared root opens the force of Jeremiah’s command: the nations are made to drink the cup, not merely offered a taste.
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