What Does Luke 15:14 Mean?
And when he had used up everything, a strong hunger came upon that land, and he began to fall short.
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
And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.THE KEY
After he has spent everything and famine has arisen around him, “want” names the shortfall where personal depletion and surrounding scarcity meet.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to the moment when what has been spent is gone and scarcity rises around you; need becomes the felt fact of coming short. It holds personal depletion beside famine in the surrounding land, showing how the two pressures meet.
THE ROOT
ὑστερεῖσθαι
hystereisthai
GROWS FROM
ὑστερ-
hyster-
To be behind, come short, or be left lacking.
“fall short” in this verse is hystereisthai. The verb here is ὑστερεῖσθαι (hystereisthai, to be in need or come short), from a word family that also carries the sense of being later or behind. Need is pictured as a shortfall: what remains no longer meets what the moment requires.
ALSO GROWS
hýsteros: Later, afterward.
ὕστερος
Its sense of what comes later echoes the idea of falling behind that shapes the verse’s word for need.
hysterēma: A deficiency; what is lacking.
ὑστέρημα
This noun makes the shortfall explicit, naming the gap between what is present and what is needed.
THE PATTERN
Need becomes real when available provision no longer matches the conditions a person faces.
And there shall rise after them seven years of hunger, and all the fullness shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt, and the hunger shall consume the land.And she said, As the LORD your God lives, I have no loaf, but only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a flask, and look, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and make it for me and for my son, that we may eat it, and die.I know how to be brought low, and I know how to overflow; in every case and in all things I have been initiated, to be filled and to hunger, to overflow and to lack.THE THREAD
And he said to them, When I sent you without purse, bag, or sandals, did you fall short of anything? And they said, Nothing.Luke uses the same Greek verb for “lacked” here and for “be in want” in Luke 15:14. The shared word asks whether the absence of provisions leaves someone coming short.
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