What Does Ecclesiastes 5:6 Mean?
Do not give your mouth to make your flesh miss the mark, and do not say before the messenger that it was a straying. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands?
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
Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin; neither say thou before the angel, that it was an error: wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thine hands?THE KEY
A spoken commitment can draw the whole body into its miss, and calling it an accident does not make its consequences vanish.
THE MEANING
Your mouth can set your embodied life on a course that misses its mark. Calling the words an accident does not remove their consequence. Voice, flesh, and the work of your hands remain joined.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that words spoken carelessly can be dismissed as a mistake with no consequence for the speaker or their work.
THE ROOT
לַחֲטִיא
laḥaṭi
GROWS FROM
חטא
ḥṭʾ
To miss, fail, or go wrong.
“make your flesh miss the mark” in this verse is laḥaṭi. Here the verb is causative: the mouth can cause the flesh to miss, not merely name an abstract fault. This root also stands beneath the word for an offering for the missing, so the miss has consequence and calls for a response.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss or go wrong.
חָטָא
The verb makes the warning active: the mouth can cause the body to miss its mark.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: A missing; in sacrificial contexts, an offering for the missing.
חַטָּאת
The same root names both the miss and a response to it, showing that the word reaches beyond an abstract label.
שְׁגָגָה
shegagah
GROWS FROM
שגג
š-g-g
To err or go wrong inadvertently.
“straying” in this verse is shegagah. The speaker calls the vow an inadvertent misstep, and the word belongs to a family for unintended error. The verse keeps that label beside the threatened loss: an unintended miss still has consequences.
ALSO GROWS
šāgag: To err unintentionally.
שָׁגַג
This verb shows the root’s sense of an inadvertent wrong, the very shade carried by the speaker’s excuse.
šōgēg: One who errs inadvertently.
שׁוֹגֵג
The root can describe the person who made the unintended error, without implying that the error had no effect.
THE PATTERN
Words spoken aloud carry consequences into the speaker’s life, body, and accountability.
Death and life are in the hand of the tongue, and those who love it eat its fruit.But I say to you, every word without work that humankind speaks, they will give back an account of it in the day of judgment.And the tongue is fire, a world of crookedness. It is set among our limbs, staining the whole body and setting the wheel of becoming ablaze, and it is lit by Gehenna.THE THREAD
I make my falling short known to you, and my crookedness I do not cover. I say, I will speak my rebellion into the open before the LORD, and you release the crookedness of my falling short. Selah.The word for “sin” in both verses comes from חטא (ḥṭʾ, to miss). Ecclesiastes warns that the mouth can cause the flesh to miss; Psalm 32 brings the miss into speech instead of hiding it, and places that acknowledgment beside forgiveness.
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