Jeremiah 25:26 — meaning, Hebrew and Greek word study, commentary
Jeremiah 25:26
And all the kings of the north, far and near, one with another, and all the kingdoms of the world, which are upon the face of the earth: and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them.
near (in place · definite article + adjective, masculine plural absolute
one
אִ֣ישׁ'ish
H376
a man as an individual or a male person · noun, common masculine singular absolute
another
אָחִ֔יו'a.Chiv
H251
a brother (used in the widest sense of literal relation… · noun, common masculine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine singular
kingdoms
הַמַּמְלְכ֣וֹתha.mam.le.Khot
H4467
dominion · definite article + noun, common feminine plural construct
world
הָאָ֔רֶץha.'A.retz
H776
the earth (at large · definite article + noun, common feminine singular absolute
face
פְּנֵ֣יpe.Nei
H6440
the face (as the part that turns) · noun, common masculine plural construct
earth
הָאֲדָמָ֑הha.'a.da.Mah
H127
soil (from its general redness) · definite article + noun, common feminine singular absolute
king
וּמֶ֥לֶךְu.Me.lekh
H4428
a king · conjunction + noun, common masculine singular construct
Sheshach
שֵׁשַׁ֖ךְshe.Shakh
H8347
Sheshak · proper noun, a place name
drink
יִשְׁתֶּ֥הyish.Teh
H8354
to imbibe (literally or figuratively) · verb, qal imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Jeremiah 51:41 How is Sheshach taken! and how is the praise of the whole earth surprised! how is Babylon become an astonishment among the nations!
Jeremiah 25:9 Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, saith the LORD, and Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bri…
Isaiah 13:1-14 The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see.
Isaiah 47:1-15 Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou s…
Jeremiah 25:12 And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the LORD, for…
Jeremiah 50:1-46 The word that the LORD spake against Babylon and against the land of the Chaldeans by Jeremiah the prophet.
Ezekiel 32:30 There be the princes of the north, all of them, and all the Zidonians, which are gone down with the slain; with their terror they are ashame…
Daniel 5:1-31 Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Jeremiah 25:15-29
Under the similitude of a cup going round, which all the company must drink of, is here represented the universal desolation that was now coming upon that part of the world which Nebuchadrezzar, who just now began to reign and act, was to be the instrument of, and which should at length recoil upon his own country. The cup in the vision is to be a sword in the accomplishment of it: so it is explained, Jer 25:16. It is the sword that I will send among them, the sword of war, that should be irresistibly strong and implacably cruel.
I. As to the circumstances of this judgment, observe,
1. Whence this destroying sword should come - from the hand of God. It is the sword of the Lord (Jer 47:6), ba…
Sheshach--Babylon; as the parallelism in Jer 51:41 proves. In the Cabalistic system (called Athbash, the first Hebrew letter in the alphabet being expressed by the last) Sheshach would exactly answer to Babel. Jeremiah may have used this system (as perhaps in Jer 51:41) for concealment at the time of this prediction, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, while Nebuchadnezzar was before Jerusalem. In Jer 51:41 there can be no concealment, as Babylon is expressly mentioned. MICHAELIS more simply explains the term "brazen-gated" (compare Isa 45:2); others, "the house of a prince." Rather, it comes from the Babylonian goddess, Shach, by reduplication of the first letter; from her Misael was named Mes…
And all the kings of the north, far and near, one with another,.... That were on the north of Judea, the kings of Syria, and those that were near to the kingdom of Babylon, whether more remote from Judea, or nearer it and which joined one another in that part of the world;
and all the kingdoms of the world, which are upon the face of the earth; the whole Babylonian monarchy, called the whole world; as the Roman empire afterwards was, Luke 2:1;
and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them; or the king of Babylon, as the Targum; and that Babylon is meant by "Sheshach" is certain from Jeremiah 51:41; but why it is so called is not so easy to say. The Jewish writers make it to be the same w…
The Church Fathers
(Verse 26.) To each one against his brother, and to all the kingdoms of the earth that are above its surface. In order not to make it long to enumerate all the regions of the Eastern provinces in detail, he generally placed all the kingdoms of the earth that are mentioned in that land. And that which he said against his brother is implied: I gave them a full measure to make them all rage, vomit, go mad, and fight with each other in mutual battles. And what he brought: And King Sesach will drink after them; and though it is not found in the Septuagint, it has this meaning: All, he says, will be subject to the Babylonian empire, and it will subject everything to its power, so that all the nations that the previous passage mentioned will serve and drink from its cup. Thus, in the vision against Babylon, it is written: Babylon, the golden cup, that intoxicates the whole earth. (Jeremiah 51:7) And finally, the king of Babylon will drink this potion, offered to him by the charioteer of the chariot, consisting of camels and donkeys, Cyrus the king of the Medes and Persians. However, someone who has at least a small knowledge of the Hebrew language will not struggle greatly to understand how Babylon, which is called Babel in Hebrew (), is also understood as Sesach (). Just as in our case the Greek alphabet is read in order up to the last letter, that is, Alpha, Beta, and so on up to Omega: and again for the memory of children we are accustomed to reverse the order of reading and mix the first letters with the last, so that we say Alpha, O, Beta, Psi: similarly among the Hebrews the first is Aleph, the second Beth, the third Ghimel, and so on up to the twenty-second, and the last letter is Thau, with the penultimate being Sin. Therefore, we read Aleph, Thau, Beth, Sin. And when we come to the middle, Lamed, the letter Chaph appears: and as, if we read correctly, we read Babel: thus, with the order changed, we read Sesach. However, the vowel letters are not placed between Beth and Beth, and Lamed, according to the language of the Hebrew tongue in this name. And I think it was wisely hidden by the holy Prophet, so as not to openly provoke the madness of those who were besieging Jerusalem, and were about to take possession of it very soon. We read that the Apostle also acted against the Roman Empire, writing about the Antichrist: 'Do you not remember that when I was…
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Captivity — (1.) Of Israel. The kingdom of the ten tribes was successively invaded by several Assyrian kings. Pul (q.v.) imposed a tribute on Menahem of a thousand talents of silver (2 Kings 15:19, 20; 1 Chr.…
Jeremiah, Book of — Consists of twenty-three separate and independent sections, arranged in five books. I. The introduction, ch. 1. II. Reproofs of the sins of the Jews, consisting of seven sections, (1.) ch. 2; (2.)…
Sheshach — (Jer. 25:26), supposed to be equivalent to Babel (Babylon), according to a secret (cabalistic) mode of writing among the Jews of unknown antiquity, which consisted in substituting the last letter of…
Babylon · .SHESHACH — .SHESHACH
Cup · .Of — .Of
Edomites, The · Predictions respecting: To share in the punishment of the nations — Predictions respecting: To share in the punishment of the nations
Nation · Chastised — Chastised
Sheshach · A symboli — A symboli
Sidonians, The · Predictions respecting: Partaking with the other nations of God’s judgments — Predictions respecting: Partaking with the other nations of God’s judgments
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
Jeremiah 25:26
26. And all the kings of the north, far and near, one with another, and all the kingdoms of the world, which are upon the face of the earth: and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them.
26. Et omnibus regibus Aquilonis tam iis ui propinqui sunt quam qui remoti, viro (hoc est, cuique) contra fratrem suum, et omnibus regnis terrae, quae sunt super faciem terrae (mutatur quidem nomen, ponit h'rph, ponit ch'dmh: et rex Sesach bibet post eos.
The Prophet speaks now of the kings of the north who bordered on the king of Babylon; for as to Judea, Babylon was northward. He calls all those who were towards Chaldea the kings of the north. He then says, Whether near or remote, ever…
The enumeration of the heathen nations begins with Egypt and goes northwards, the peoples dwelling to the east and west of Judah being ranged alongside one another. First we have in Jer 25:20 the races of Arabia and Philistia that bordered on Egypt to the east and west; and then in Jer 25:21 the Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites to the east, and, Jer 25:22, the Phoenicians with their colonies to the west. Next we have the Arabian tribes of the desert extending eastwards from Palestine to the Euphrates (Jer 25:23, Jer 25:24); then the Elamites and Medes in the distant east (Jer 25:25), the near and distant kings of the north, and all kingdoms upon earth; last of all the king of Babylon (Jer 2…
Dedan, Tema, . . . Buz, and Zimri were located in the desert area east of the Jordan Valley, north of Arabia. Elam and Media, located in the highlands to the east of Babylon, made up the core of the Persian Empire, which conquered Babylon in 539 BC.
