What Does Job 14:15 Mean?
You call, and I answer you; you pine for 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
Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.THE KEY
The line goes beyond God answering your call: it says the maker longs for the work of those hands.
THE MEANING
When you call, God answers; the verse holds that exchange as personal and present. The maker also desires the work of God’s own hands, placing you within a longing that begins with God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that being God’s handiwork means being discarded once made: it places the maker’s own desire on that handiwork.
THE ROOT
תִּכְסֹף
tiksof
GROWS FROM
כָּסַף
kasaph
To long for, to yearn toward.
“pine for” in this verse is tiksof. The word translated “desire” comes from a root of yearning that can also describe hungry eagerness. The verse places that longing in the maker: what God’s hands have made is not merely completed work, but something God still yearns toward.
ALSO GROWS
kasfah: Longed for.
כָּסְפָה
In Psalm 84:2, this form describes the soul longing for the LORD’s courts, showing the root’s direct sense of yearning.
yikhsoph: Yearns eagerly, is greedy for.
יִכְסֹף
In Psalm 17:12, the root describes a lion eager for prey, revealing that this longing can carry fierce appetite.
THE PATTERN
The maker remains engaged with what is made, answering its cry and claiming it as handiwork.
In the day I cry out, you answer me, and you stir me with strength in my living soul.But now, LORD, you are our father. We are the clay, and you our potter, and all of us are the work of your hand.For we are his making, created in the Anointed One, Jesus, for good works, which God prepared beforehand, so that in them we might walk.THE THREAD
My living soul pines, even runs out, for the courts of the LORD. My heart and my flesh ring out for the living God.The psalm’s כָּסְפָה (kasfah, “longed”) and Job’s תִּכְסֹף (tiksof, “you long”) grow from כסף (kasaph, “to yearn”). In the psalm the living soul longs toward God; here the longing runs the other way, from the maker toward the work of God’s hands.
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