What Does Job 14:1 Mean?
Man, born of a woman, is short of days and full of trembling.
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
Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.THE KEY
רֹגֶז (rogez, agitation) makes trouble sound like a quake running through life’s few days.
THE MEANING
Your days are few, and they are full of disturbance; the verse holds brevity and unrest together in the life you inhabit now. Trouble is named as a real feature of human days.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the expectation that a brief life is therefore a peaceful one: this verse places few days beside a fullness of trouble.
THE ROOT
רֹגֶז
rogez
GROWS FROM
רגז
To tremble, quake, or be agitated.
“full of trembling” in this verse is rogez. English can make trouble sound like a set of separate events; רֹגֶז (rogez, agitation) lets the verse name unrest itself. Life is described as full of this disturbance, not merely touched by it.
ALSO GROWS
ragaz: To tremble, quake, or be agitated.
רָגַז
This verb shows how the trouble in the verse can carry the force of shaking and unrest.
yirgezû: They tremble.
יִרְגְּזוּ
This form uses the same root for people trembling, showing how the word can name unrest as a felt response.
קְצַר
qĕṣar
GROWS FROM
קצר
To be short; also, to reap or cut down.
“short of days” in this verse is qĕṣar. The Hebrew describes the days as short, using a root that also means to reap. That shared root gives brevity the image of a span cut to its measure.
ALSO GROWS
qatsar: To reap; to be short.
קָצַר
The verb joins shortness with reaping, giving the few days a sense of a measured span.
qatsir: Harvest.
קָצִיר
A harvest is what is reaped when its season comes, making the shortness of the days concrete as a limited span.
THE PATTERN
Human life is brief and exposed to real distress.
The days of our years, in them, are seventy years, or with strength eighty years; yet their span is toil and emptiness, for it is sheared away swiftly, and we take wing.You do not know what tomorrow holds. For what is your life? You are a mist, showing itself for a little while, and then made unseen.THE THREAD
There the wicked stop their trembling, and there the spent of strength come to rest.Job 3:17 uses the same root in רֹגֶז (rogez, agitation), rendered “troubling.” Here unrest fills human days; there the same unrest ceases, and the weary rest.
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