What Does Job 10:11 Mean?
You clothe me with skin and flesh, and you knit me with bones and sinews.
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
Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews.THE KEY
Your body is both the garment around you and the enclosure holding you.
THE MEANING
Skin and flesh clothe you; bones and sinews fence you in. The same boundaries that give your body shape can also feel like confinement, and the verse lets both remain present.
THE ROOT
תְּסֹכְכֵנִי
tesokkheni
GROWS FROM
סכך
s-k-k
To cover, screen, or hedge in.
“knit” in this verse is tesokkheni. The verb behind “fenced” can mean to cover, screen, or hedge in. Your body is pictured as an enclosure; in Job’s living lament, that enclosing can mean being held together and feeling hemmed in.
ALSO GROWS
tesukkēnî: You covered me (Psalm 139:13).
תְּסֻכֵּנִי
The same root describes the covering of the body in the womb, linking the body’s enclosure here with its first covering.
sukkāh: A booth or shelter; a covered enclosure.
סֻכָּה
This branch shows that covering can make a shelter, while the verse’s language also leaves room for the felt limits of an enclosure.
תַּלְבִּישֵׁנִי
talbishēnî
GROWS FROM
לבש
l-b-š
To put on or wear as clothing; to clothe.
“clothed” in this verse is talbishēnî. The verb pictures skin and flesh as what is put on, like clothing. The body itself becomes the garment in the verse, its outer layer around your living form.
ALSO GROWS
levūsh: A garment or clothing.
לְבוּשׁ
This noun makes the clothing image concrete: skin and flesh are named as the body’s covering.
wayyalbišēm: He clothed them (Genesis 3:21).
וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם
The same root describes God clothing the first humans, extending the image of a body or covering given to human life.
עֲצָמוֹת
ʿăṣāmôt
GROWS FROM
עצם
ʿ-ṣ-m
The root carries the sense of strength; the related noun means bone, substance, or self.
The word for bones shares a root associated with strength, and the related noun can mean substance or self. The frame is more than a fence around you: it is the substantial core of your embodied life.
ALSO GROWS
ʿeṣem: Bone; also substance or self, as in “the very” thing.
עֶצֶם
The bone word can also name what something is in itself, making the body’s frame part of its very substance.
ʿāṣûm: Strong or mighty.
עָצוּם
This related word brings the root’s sense of strength to the body’s inner structure.
THE PATTERN
A living body takes shape through covering, formation, and an inner structure fitted into the whole.
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.For you take hold of my kidneys; you weave me in my mother's womb.But now God has set the limbs, each one of them, in the body, as he willed.THE THREAD
For you take hold of my kidneys; you weave me in my mother's womb.The Hebrew verb translated “fenced” in Job shares its root with “covered” in this verse. The same word brings together the body’s enclosing frame and the covering of its earliest formation.
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