What Does Job 15:11 Mean?
Are the comforts of God too small for you? Is there a hidden word with you?
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
Are the consolations of God small with thee? is there any secret thing with thee?THE KEY
The Hebrew leaves a hinge between a hidden matter and a word spoken gently, so the question turns on both what is present and how it reaches you.
THE MEANING
The question asks whether God’s consolations feel too small and whether a hidden or quietly spoken word is with you. Its sharp phrasing can make ongoing pain sound like evidence that you are slighting the comfort offered. Yet the Hebrew also allows the gentler sense of a word spoken softly into pain.
THE ROOT
תַּנְחוּמוֹת
tanḥumot
GROWS FROM
נחם
Comfort, console; in other forms, be comforted or relent.
“comforts” in this verse is tanḥumot. This word family holds both comforting someone and being moved to relent. The connection gives consolation a responsive quality: it can meet distress rather than merely explain it away.
ALSO GROWS
menaḥem: Comforter
מְנַחֵם
The comfort in this verse is not only an idea; the same root can name one who brings comfort to another.
niḥam: Be comforted; relent
נִחַם
The root also appears in forms for being comforted or relenting, linking consolation with a change in response.
דָּבָר
davar
GROWS FROM
דבר
Speak; word, matter, or thing.
“hidden word” in this verse is davar. The Hebrew word can name both an utterance and a matter. Beside לָאַט (la’at, quietly or secretly), this leaves room for the verse’s second phrase to be heard as a hidden thing or as a word spoken gently.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: He spoke
דִּבֵּר
This verbal form brings speech into the same word family as the “word” in the verse.
devarim: Words, matters, things
דְּבָרִים
The plural keeps utterance and matter together, illuminating why the KJV can render the phrase with “thing.”
THE PATTERN
Comfort meets sorrow through words and presence while sorrow is still real.
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.In the multitude of my thoughts within me, your comforts caress my living soul.Flourishing are those who mourn, for they are comforted.THE THREAD
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.“Consolations” here and “Comfort” in Isaiah grow from נחם (naḥam, comfort or console). Isaiah gives that root as a direct word of consolation, opening a contrast with the sharp question here: comfort can be spoken to the grieving rather than used to measure whether their grief is acceptable.
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