What Does Jeremiah 31:36 Mean in the King James?
If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever.
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 verse binds Israel’s continued existence to the fixed ordinances of creation: if those ordinances depart, Israel’s seed ceases too.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to you now by setting Israel’s continued existence beside the ordinances that hold the created order. It presents the people’s continuity as part of the same enduring order before God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that Israel’s continued existence is merely temporary, placing it within the enduring order named in the verse.
THE ROOT
חֻקִּים
ḥuqqim
GROWS FROM
חקק
ḥ-q-q
To cut, inscribe, or decree.
English “ordinances” can sound like rules; חֻקִּים (ḥuqqim, “statutes”) also carries the sense of fixed, marked boundaries. The verse places these boundaries of the created order and Israel’s continued existence in one conditional line.
ALSO GROWS
ḥoq: A prescribed statute or measure.
חֹק
It shows how an ordinance can carry the sense of a fixed measure, matching the verse’s image of an ordered cosmos.
meḥoqeq: One who decrees or establishes a measure.
מְחֹקֵק
This branch links the ordinances to the act of establishing the order on which the verse’s comparison rests.
זֶרַע
zeraʿ
GROWS FROM
זרע
z-r-ʿ
To sow or scatter seed.
זֶרַע (zeraʿ, “seed; offspring”) holds the image of sowing together with the lineage that grows from it. Here Israel’s seed is a people carried forward through generations, whose continued existence is bound to the enduring ordinances.
ALSO GROWS
zāraʿ: To sow seed.
זָרַע
The verb keeps the act of planting behind the verse’s image of lineage.
zārūaʿ: That which has been sown.
זָרוּעַ
It presents lineage as something carried forward through generations.
THE PATTERN
The continuing life of a people is pictured alongside the enduring rhythms and ordinances of creation.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before me. It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as a faithful witness in heaven. Selah.I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.THE THREAD
Thus saith the LORD; If my covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth; Then will I cast away the seed of Jacob, and David my servant, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will cause their captivity to return, and have mercy on them.Jeremiah 33 repeats the word זֶרַע (zeraʿ, “seed; offspring”) and the same link between the ordinances of heaven and the continued line of Israel. The echo makes explicit the connection compressed into this verse.
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