What Does Job 16:20 Mean?
My friends are my scoffers. But my eye drips toward God.
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
My friends scorn me: but mine eye poureth out tears unto God.THE KEY
Even as friends scorn, the eye becomes a spring whose tears run straight toward God.
THE MEANING
The voices nearest you can meet your pain with contempt, while your grief still flows directly toward God. The scorn does not make the tears smaller or silence their address.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that being mocked by those close to you makes your grief unfit to bring before God is undone here.
THE ROOT
דָּמְעָה
damʿah
GROWS FROM
דמע
d-m-ʿ
To weep or shed tears.
“poureth” in this verse is damʿah. The verb makes the eye an active source of weeping, not merely a witness to pain. The same root names tears elsewhere, keeping the act of weeping and what flows from it joined beneath the English words.
ALSO GROWS
dāmaʿ: To weep or shed tears.
דָּמַע
This verbal branch shares the same seed as the tears flowing from the eye in Job’s line.
dimʿah: A tear; tears.
דִּמְעָה
This noun names what the eye releases, carrying the root’s act of weeping into a tangible image.
עֵינִי
ʿeini
GROWS FROM
עין
ʿ-y-n
Eye; the same word-family also names a spring or source.
Hebrew עַיִן can mean both an eye and a spring. Beside the verb of weeping, that overlap lets the eye be seen as an opening from which tears flow toward God.
ALSO GROWS
ʿayin: Eye; also a spring or source.
עַיִן
The verse’s eye carries both the sense of seeing and the image of a water source.
maʿyan: Spring or fountain.
מַעְיָן
This related word extends the eye’s source-image: the tears are water flowing from an opening.
THE PATTERN
Human contempt does not prevent grief from reaching God as tears, prayer, or care.
Turn aside from me, all you workers of crookedness; for the LORD hears the voice of my weeping.The LORD is near to those whose heart is broken, and delivers those crushed in breath.throwing all your divided care upon him, for you matter to him.THE THREAD
You count my wanderings; you set my tears in your skin bottle. Are they not in your count?Job’s דִּמְעָה and the psalm’s word for tears come from the same root for weeping. Here the eye’s tears flow toward God; there they are pictured as kept in God’s bottle and book.
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