What Does Isaiah 1:6 Mean?
From the sole of the foot to the head there is no unbroken place in it, but wounds, welts, and fresh blows. They have not been closed, nor bound up, nor softened with oil.
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
From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.THE KEY
The Hebrew word behind “soundness” names wholeness: the image is of a body wounded from foot to head, with no care reaching it.
THE MEANING
Pain fills the whole bodily field here, from the foot to the head. The wounds are open, the bruises visible, and the sores festering; none has been closed, bound, or softened. Injury and the absence of care are both present in the image.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the thought that one isolated hurt leaves the rest untouched: the image runs from foot to head, and no wound has received care.
THE ROOT
מְתֹם
metom
GROWS FROM
תמם
t-m-m
To be complete or whole.
“unbroken” in this verse is metom. The Hebrew word behind “soundness” is מְתֹם (metom, wholeness or soundness), from תָּמַם (tamam, to be complete or whole). The root shifts attention from a count of injuries to the wholeness missing from the body. Its branches describe what is whole, complete, or held with integrity.
ALSO GROWS
tam: Complete, whole, or blameless.
תָּם
This branch gives the missing soundness the sense of an intact whole.
tamim: Whole, complete, or unblemished.
תָּמִים
It echoes the verse’s contrast between bodily wholeness and wounds spread from foot to head.
tummah: Integrity or wholeness.
תֻּמָּה
This branch shows the root can name a condition of wholeness, not merely the absence of a particular injury.
THE PATTERN
Wholeness is absent where wounds remain unattended, and care becomes visible in binding, healing, and tending the injured place.
There is no unbroken place in my flesh because of your boiling; there is no wholeness in my bones because of my falling short.Come, and let us turn back to the LORD, for he has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck, and he will bind us up.And he came near to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, and lifted him onto his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and tended him.THE THREAD
There is no unbroken place in my flesh because of your boiling; there is no wholeness in my bones because of my falling short.Isaiah’s “soundness” and the Psalm’s “soundness” render the same Hebrew מְתֹם (metom, wholeness). The parallel opens the image from visible wounds to the whole flesh-and-bone body: wholeness is what has gone missing.
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