What Does Jeremiah 50:16 Mean in the King James?
Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest: for fear of the oppressing sword they shall turn every one to his people, and they shall flee every one to his own land.
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
Babylon’s abundance depends on the hands that sow and reap, and the sword empties the land by driving those hands away.
THE MEANING
This verse shows how an oppressing power empties a land of the people whose work sustains it: the sower and harvest worker are cut off from Babylon. Each person turns toward their own people and flees to their own land, so the sword breaks both production and the city’s hold on belonging.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a prosperous center can keep its abundance while terror rules it: fear drives the workers out, severing the cycle that sustains the fields.
THE ROOT
זֹרֵעַ
zōrēaʿ
GROWS FROM
זרע
z-r-ʿ
To sow or scatter seed.
English makes “sower” sound like a job title, but its root also names seed and offspring. The worker being driven away is the human link between what is planted now and what can grow later.
ALSO GROWS
zeraʿ: Seed; offspring.
זֶרַע
The sower’s work carries both the next crop and the possibility of a next generation.
zāraʿ: To sow.
זָרַע
The verb names the act that begins the cycle Babylon’s workers are forced to leave behind.
קָצִיר
qāṣîr
GROWS FROM
קצר
q-ṣ-r
To reap or cut short; also, to be short.
The harvest word grows from a root that also means “to be short”: reaping is the cutting of what has grown. Here, the harvest worker is driven from the land, and the expected cutting of grain gives way to the sword’s interruption.
ALSO GROWS
qōṣēr: Reaper; one who harvests.
קֹצֵר
The reaper is the person whose work completes the growing cycle that the verse shows being broken.
qōṣer: Shortness; being cut short.
קֹצֶר
This branch gives the harvest word an edge of interruption: what should reach its appointed end is cut short.
THE PATTERN
Scripture marks Babylon’s unraveling through departure: people are scattered, flee home, or are called out.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.And it shall be as the chased roe, and as a sheep that no man taketh up: they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land.And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.THE THREAD
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.Genesis places seedtime and harvest inside a rhythm that does not cease across the earth; Jeremiah shows Babylon’s fields depending on the people its sword drives away. The shared words reveal the threat as a rupture in one land’s cycle of planting and food, not the end of life’s wider rhythm.
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