What Does Nehemiah 5:6 Mean?
And I burned exceedingly when I heard their cry and these words.
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 I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words.THE KEY
Nehemiah’s anger begins when another person’s outcry reaches him as something heard, not distant noise.
THE MEANING
The verse meets you when another person’s cry and the words behind it become real to you. Distress arrives both as an outcry and as specific matters that can be heard. Anger rises as heat at what that hearing reveals.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It unsettles the belief that a steady listener must remain emotionally untouched: here, the cry reaches the listener as anger.
THE ROOT
זַעֲקָתָם
zaʿaqātām
GROWS FROM
זעק
To cry out or call urgently.
זעק names an urgent outcry that breaks into hearing; it is more than a general feeling of sadness. Nehemiah’s anger follows when the cry is heard, showing how distress becomes concrete enough to demand a response.
ALSO GROWS
zaʿaq: To cry out or call urgently.
זָעַק
The verb shares the root זעק and gives the outcry its force as an appeal that cannot be mistaken for silence.
zeʿaqah: An outcry or cry for help.
זְעָקָה
This noun shares the same three root consonants and names the urgent appeal Nehemiah hears.
כְּשָׁמְעִי
kəšāmeʿî
GROWS FROM
שמע
To hear, listen, or attend to what is heard.
“heard” in this verse is kəšāmeʿî. The root שמע can name hearing and listening that takes in a report. The passage places anger immediately after hearing, so the outcry is not detached sound: it reaches an inward judgment about what is happening.
ALSO GROWS
shāmaʿ: To hear or listen.
שָׁמַע
This is the same verb root as the word translated “heard,” showing that the verse turns on what reaches the listener.
shemūʿāh: A report or tidings, something heard.
שְׁמוּעָה
The related noun makes visible how hearing can carry a matter into awareness rather than leave it as mere sound.
הַדְּבָרִים
haddəvārîm
GROWS FROM
דבר
A word, matter, or thing; also the act of speaking.
The verse pairs an outcry with “these words”: דָּבָר can mean both a spoken word and a matter or thing. English can make speech sound separate from the condition it describes, while this Hebrew root lets the words and the matter arrive together.
ALSO GROWS
dābār: A word, matter, or thing.
דָּבָר
This noun shares the root consonants and holds speech together with the matter being spoken about.
dibber: To speak.
דִּבֵּר
This verb shares the root דבר and connects the heard words to the act of speaking them.
THE PATTERN
When distress is truly heard, it becomes a summons that moves the hearer toward response.
If you press them down in any way, and they cry out at all to me, I will surely hear and respond to their cry.The aligned cry out, and the LORD hears, and snatches them out of all their narrow places.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
And the LORD said, I have surely seen the bending low of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their drivers. For I know their pains.The phrase “have heard” uses the same Hebrew root, שמע, as “when I heard” in Nehemiah. Here hearing joins seeing affliction and knowing sorrow, so the cry is received alongside the condition that gives it force.
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