What Does Nahum 3:15 Mean?
There the fire will eat you; the sword will cut you off, and it will eat you like the cankerworm. Make yourself heavy like the cankerworm, make yourself heavy like the locust.
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
There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off, it shall eat thee up like the cankerworm: make thyself many as the cankerworm, make thyself many as the locusts.THE KEY
The swarm can multiply, but multiplication only gives destruction more to consume.
THE MEANING
Here the threat reaches everything: fire consumes, the sword cuts off, and even what multiplies like locusts is swallowed. The verse speaks now of a scale that offers no shelter; becoming many does not place a thing beyond destruction.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that sheer numbers, growth, or force make a thing untouchable.
THE ROOT
תֹּאכְלֵךְ
toʾkhlēkh
GROWS FROM
א־כ־ל
ʾ-k-l
Eat, consume.
“eat” in this verse is toʾkhlēkh. The same root names the act of eating, the eater, and food. English makes “devour” sound only destructive, while the Hebrew connects this threat to the ordinary language of what eats and what is eaten.
ALSO GROWS
ʾokhel: eater
אֹכֵל
In Nahum 3:12, ripe figs fall into the mouth of the eater; the same root makes that image echo here, where the city itself is consumed.
ʾokhel: food
אֹכֶל
The root also names what is eaten, revealing how the threatened city becomes the object of consumption.
הִתְכַּבֵּד
hithkabbed
GROWS FROM
כ־ב־ד
k-b-d
Be heavy or weighty; in this form and context, become numerous or abundant.
“make yourself heavy” in this verse is hithkabbed. The verb translated “make thyself many” carries the root’s sense of weight: the swarm swells into a mass. Yet that apparent abundance does not protect it from the fire and sword named in the same verse.
ALSO GROWS
kavod: weight, honor, glory
כָּבוֹד
The familiar word for glory retains the concrete sense of weight, giving the swarm’s abundance the feel of gathered mass.
hikhbid: make heavy, intensify
הִכְבִּיד
This causative form of the same root describes adding weight; here, becoming more numerous still leaves the swarm exposed to being consumed.
THE PATTERN
Multiplication and apparent strength cannot outrun the force that consumes what has become vulnerable.
Therefore, as the tongue of fire eats the stubble, and the flame lets the dry grass drop, so their root shall be as rot, and their blossom shall rise like dust, because they have rejected the instruction of the LORD of hosts, and spurned the word of the Set-Apart One of Israel.But what bears thorns and thistles fails the test, and is near a curse; its end is the burning.Therefore her blows shall come in one day, death, and mourning, and hunger; and she shall be burned down with fire, for strong is the LORD God who judges her.THE THREAD
All your walled cities are fig trees with first-ripe figs; if they are shaken, they will fall into the mouth of the eater.“Eater” in this verse shares the same Hebrew root as “devour” in Nahum 3:15. The strongholds that seem like defenses become ripe fruit in an eater’s mouth, opening the image of the city itself as what gets consumed.
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