What Does Jeremiah 48:38 Mean in the King James?
There shall be lamentation generally upon all the housetops of Moab, and in the streets thereof: for I have broken Moab like a vessel wherein is no pleasure, saith the LORD.
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 breaking is paired with chephets, desire or delight: Moab becomes a vessel in which no delight is taken.
THE MEANING
The verse puts the reader before a public collapse: lament fills Moab’s rooftops and streets. The LORD names the breaking directly and likens Moab to a vessel in which there is no delight; the image holds the severity of judgment without softening it.
THE ROOT
נִשְׁבַּר
nishbar
GROWS FROM
שבר
to break, smash, or shatter
The verse uses nishbar, “is broken,” from shavar; its branch shever names breakage or ruin, while mishbar can name a breaker or breaking wave. The root ranges from a thing split open to a force that overwhelms, giving Moab’s collapse more weight than a superficial crack.
ALSO GROWS
shever: breakage, fracture, ruin
שֶׁבֶר
The same seed extends physical breaking into the language of ruin, fitting the verse’s sweeping lament.
mishbar: breaker, breaking wave
מִשְׁבָּר
This branch pictures rupture as a force that crashes through, sharpening the image of Moab’s collapse.
חֵפֶץ
chephets
GROWS FROM
חפץ
to desire, delight, or take pleasure in
“pleasure” in this verse is chephets. Chephets carries the sense of desire or delight, so the vessel is described not only as broken but as one in which no delight is taken. The same root can express delight in someone or something, making its absence part of the judgment’s image.
ALSO GROWS
chafets: desiring, taking delight
חָפֵץ
This verb shows the root as active desire; the verse marks that delight as absent from the vessel.
Hephzibah: my delight is in her
חֶפְצִי־בָהּ
This name uses the same root for delight in Zion, opening the contrast with a vessel in which no delight is found.
THE PATTERN
When a vessel breaks, the rupture exposes its condition or releases what it contains.
And shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again: and they shall bury them in Tophet, till there be no place to bury.I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head.THE THREAD
And shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again: and they shall bury them in Tophet, till there be no place to bury.Jeremiah 19:11 uses the same root, שבר (shavar, “break”), for the LORD’s act of breaking the people and the city, and it also names a potter’s vessel. That verse makes explicit how irreversible the vessel image of judgment can be.
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