What Does Psalm 78:47 Mean?
He struck down their vines with hail, and their sycamores with frost.
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
He destroyed their vines with hail, and their sycomore trees with frost.THE KEY
The verse makes the land’s loss a killing: hail and frost strike the living growth that feeds and shades.
THE MEANING
The vine and the sycamore are living growth, and the verse names their destruction without softening it. Hail strikes one; frost strikes the other. Devastation reaches both what feeds and what shelters.
THE ROOT
יַהֲרֹג
yaharog
GROWS FROM
הרג
h-r-g
To kill, to slay.
The Hebrew verb behind “destroyed” is הָרַג (harag), “to kill, to slay,” so the line presents the vine and sycamores as living growth struck down. Related forms name the killer and the slain, keeping the image inside the language of life and death.
ALSO GROWS
horeg: One who kills; a killer.
הֹרֵג
This active form carries the verse’s act of striking living growth into the same root family.
harug: One slain; a slain person.
הָרוּג
This passive form makes the consequence of the root’s action visible: what is struck is treated as something living that can be killed.
THE PATTERN
When devastation reaches the land, it strikes the growth that feeds and shelters life.
He struck their vines and their fig trees, and broke the trees of their borders.The vine has withered, the fig tree wilts; pomegranate, date palm, and apple, all the trees of the field, have dried up; for the leaping has withered from the children of humankind.The first messenger sounds, and there comes hail and fire mixed with blood, and they are thrown upon the earth; and the third part of the trees is burned down, and all green grass is burned down.THE THREAD
He struck their vines and their fig trees, and broke the trees of their borders.Psalm 105:33 repeats the Hebrew noun גֶּפֶן (gephen, vine) in the phrase “their vines,” making the same target audible across both verses. The mention of fig trees alongside it sharpens the image into the destruction of fruit-bearing growth.
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