What Does Job 15:16 Mean?
How much more loathsome and ruined is man, who drinks crookedness like the waters?
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 much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?THE KEY
The verse measures human corruption by what it takes in as effortlessly as water.
THE MEANING
This verse places the reader before an unsettling measure of wrongdoing: injustice can become as familiar and routine as drinking water. The image describes more than a single failure; it shows wrong being taken in without pause.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what feels ordinary is harmless: injustice can become part of a person’s daily intake through sheer familiarity.
THE ROOT
שֹׁתֶה
shoteh
GROWS FROM
שתה
To drink, to take in as liquid.
“drinketh” in this verse is shoteh. The Hebrew verb is an active participle, presenting drinking as ongoing. The image makes wrongdoing feel less like an isolated act and more like a familiar intake.
ALSO GROWS
mishteh: A drinking feast or banquet.
מִשְׁתֶּה
The same root can name an occasion organized around drinking; here, the repeated act is an appetite for injustice.
shetiyah: Drinking.
שְׁתִיָּה
This noun preserves the root’s plain act of taking liquid in, the ordinary action used to measure the verse’s disturbing image.
עַוְלָה
avlah
GROWS FROM
עול
Unjust or crooked dealing; acting wrongly.
Here, “iniquity” carries the concrete sense of injustice and wrongful conduct. The verse pictures that unjust way of acting as something so familiar it is swallowed like water.
ALSO GROWS
avel: Injustice or wrongdoing.
עָוֶל
This noun names the wrong itself, sharpening what the verse depicts as readily consumed.
avval: An unjust person or wrongdoer.
עַוָּל
The same root can describe the person marked by unjust dealing, linking the consumed wrong to the one who takes it in.
THE PATTERN
Wrongdoing is pictured as something consumed, showing how readily it can be taken in and made familiar.
What man is like Job, who drinks up scorning like waters?For they eat the bread of restlessness, and drink the wine of violence.For all the nations have drunk from the wine of the seething of her selling herself, and the kings of the earth have sold themselves with her, and the traders of the earth have grown rich from the abundance of her feasts.THE THREAD
What man is like Job, who drinks up scorning like waters?This verse uses the same Hebrew verb שָׁתָה (shatah, drink) and the same comparison to water, while naming scorning as what is drunk. The echo sharpens Job 15:16’s image: wrongdoing becomes familiar through how readily it is taken in.
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