What Does Job 13:23 Mean?
How many are my crookednesses and shortcomings? Make known to me my rebellion and my falling short.
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
How many are mine iniquities and sins? make me to know my transgression and my sin.THE KEY
Job names two different ruptures, rebellion and missing, and asks for each to be made visible.
THE MEANING
You can sense that something is wrong without knowing its full shape. This verse gives that uncertainty a direct question: how much is mine, and what exactly have I broken or missed? Its urgency remains in the asking; the hidden account has not yet been revealed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A vague sense of guilt is the same as knowing what has happened; the verse asks for the specific count and name.
THE ROOT
פִּשְׁעִי
pishʿi
GROWS FROM
פשע
break away; rebel
The word Job calls “mine” names rebellion, a breaking away. Asking to know it is asking for the rupture’s actual shape to be exposed, not merely for a label of guilt.
ALSO GROWS
pāshaʿ: to rebel, break away
פָּשַׁע
The verb names the act behind the noun: transgression is a breakaway.
pōshēaʿ: one who rebels
פּוֹשֵׁעַ
This form names the one who breaks away, making the root’s action personal.
חַטָּאתִי
ḥaṭṭāʾtī
GROWS FROM
חטא
miss, fail; go wrong
“falling short” in this verse is ḥaṭṭāʾtī. The verse places missing beside rebellion, giving the reader two distinct ways to see what is wrong: a failure to reach the mark and a breakaway. Together they make “sin” more specific than a single, flattened feeling of guilt.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: to miss, fail, sin
חָטָא
The verb names the action behind Job’s “sin”: missing is not only a condition but something that happens.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: sin; an offering for sin
חַטָּאת
The same word family can name both the missing and an offering associated with it, holding the failure and its remedy within one root.
THE PATTERN
What remains hidden becomes a question of truth when it is brought into explicit knowledge.
Who can tell the wanderings apart? From what is hidden, cleanse me.Probe me, O God, and perceive my heart; test me, and perceive my burning thoughts.Therefore, judge nothing before its season, until the Lord comes, who will light up the hidden things of darkness, and will make visible the plans of the hearts. And then the praise will come to each one from God.THE THREAD
Whoever covers his rebellions shall not prosper, but whoever speaks them into the open and lets them go shall be shown compassion.The Hebrew word for “transgressions” in Proverbs comes from the same root פשע as Job’s “transgression.” Proverbs places that root beside covering and leaving; what Job asks to have made known is the breakaway that can no longer remain unnamed.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us