What Does Lamentations 5:13 Mean?
Young men carry the grinding stone, and boys stumble under the wood.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.THE KEY
The verse sets the prime of life to grinding, then shows children losing their footing under wood: exploitation appears as weight breaking down the young.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks wherever the young are turned into labor and children buckle under the loads placed on them. The body makes the cost visible: hands grind, feet stagger, and wood is carried until balance gives way.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that youth makes a body able to bear whatever power demands: here, children lose their footing beneath the load.
THE ROOT
כָּשָׁלוּ
kashalu
GROWS FROM
כשל
Stumble, totter, or lose one’s footing.
“stumble” in this verse is kashalu. The root carries the bodily sense of stumbling and failing to keep one’s footing. It also gives Hebrew a word for a stumbling block, joining the act of falling with what brings the fall about.
ALSO GROWS
kāšal: To stumble, totter, or fail.
כָּשַׁל
This verb names the children’s loss of footing beneath the wood.
mikhshol: A stumbling block or obstacle.
מִכְשׁוֹל
The same root names both the stumble and what obstructs a steady step, deepening the image of bodies buckling under a burden.
טְחוֹן
teḥon
GROWS FROM
טחן
Grind or crush by grinding.
“carry the grinding stone” in this verse is teḥon. The grinding here belongs to a root used for physical work that reduces something through repeated pressure. The same root describes Samson grinding in prison, linking the word to labor imposed on a captive body.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāḥan: To grind.
טָחַן
This is the verb behind the grinding labor assigned to the young men.
ṭōḥēn: One who grinds.
טוֹחֵן
Judges 16:21 uses this form for Samson, who is made to grind in the prison house; the shared root keeps coerced bodily labor in view.
בַּחוּרִים
baḥurim
GROWS FROM
בחר
Choose or select.
The word for young men shares its root with choosing and choice. It holds the sense of youth in its prime alongside the language of selection, and the verse places that prime directly into grinding labor.
ALSO GROWS
bāḥar: To choose or select.
בָּחַר
This verb shares the seed of the word for young men, placing choice and selection within the verse’s naming of them.
mibḥar: Choice or the finest selection.
מִבְחָר
This related form carries the sense of what is choice, sharpening the contrast between the young men’s prime and the labor imposed on them.
THE PATTERN
The weight of domination is transferred onto the bodies of those with less power.
Go now, therefore, and serve, for no straw shall be given to you, yet you shall give the measure of bricks.Your father made our yoke hard. So now, lighten the hard service of your father, and his heavy yoke that he set upon us, and we will serve you.For they tie up heavy loads, hard to lift, and lay them on the shoulders of people, but they themselves will not move them, even with one of their fingers.THE THREAD
Take the millstones and grind meal. Uncover your locks, bare your leg, uncover your thigh, and cross over the rivers.Both verses use the טחן (ṭḥn) root for grinding, making the labor itself the connection. Isaiah places grinding beside exposure and forced passage; Lamentations places it beside children staggering under wood, and both show labor within a scene of humiliation and domination.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
You can read any verse this way in the app, keep it as a card, and send it on.
A Bible app where you send verses from your keyboard and in Messages, and every verse has a Deep Dive.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us