What Does Job 15:5 Mean?
For your mouth teaches your crookedness, and you choose the tongue of the crafty.
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
For thy mouth uttereth thine iniquity, and thou choosest the tongue of the crafty.THE KEY
In Hebrew, crookedness teaches the mouth, and the crafty tongue is chosen: speech is both shaped inwardly and chosen outwardly.
THE MEANING
Crookedness does not merely pass through your mouth as something you report; it can tutor the words you speak. Choosing a crafty tongue reveals the pattern that has shaped your speech.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that speech is only an outward performance, untouched by what is bent within. Here, the mouth learns from that crookedness, and the chosen tongue gives it voice.
THE ROOT
עֲרוּמִים
ʿărûmîm
GROWS FROM
ערם
Craftiness or shrewdness; the same consonants also occur in a word for nakedness or being bare, creating a consonantal echo rather than making the two senses interchangeable.
The Hebrew word for the crafty echoes the word for naked in Genesis 2:25, so cunning carries a sound of exposure: a crafted tongue can uncover the bent it serves. Before this word appears, the verse says that crookedness teaches the mouth; the crafty tongue is both trained and chosen.
ALSO GROWS
ʿārûm: Crafty, shrewd.
עָרוּם
This singular form names the quality attributed to the tongue Job says is chosen.
ʿărummîm: Naked, bare.
עֲרוּמִּים
This consonantally identical form describes the man and woman in Genesis 2:25; its echo lets craftiness sound alongside exposure without treating the two meanings as identical.
THE PATTERN
Speech gives voice to the inward pattern that shapes and guides it.
The tongue of the wise makes knowledge good, but the mouth of fools gushes out folly.You offspring of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.Out of the same mouth comes forth blessing and curse. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.THE THREAD
Now the serpent was smoother than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, Did God really say, You shall not eat from every tree of the garden?The Hebrew word translated “subtil” shares the ערם consonantal family with Job’s word for the “crafty.” The connection makes Job’s chosen tongue echo the serpent’s calculated speech, where a question itself carries the craft.
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