What Does Job 16:6 Mean?
Though I speak, my pain does not walk away. And though I hold my tongue, what is parted from me?
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
Though I speak, my grief is not asswaged: and though I forbear, what am I eased?THE KEY
The Hebrew asks what will “go from me”, relief is pictured as pain departing, yet neither speech nor silence makes it move.
THE MEANING
The ache is present whether you speak or stop. Putting it into words does not automatically lessen it, and restraint does not make it depart. The verse leaves the question of relief open.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that pain must ease as soon as it is spoken, or that keeping it in will make it disappear.
THE ROOT
כְּאֵבִי
ke'ebi
GROWS FROM
כאב
ka'av
To feel pain or ache; pain.
The word rendered “grief” carries the concrete sense of pain or aching. Its root also forms words for an ache and for pain or suffering, giving the verse a felt wound beneath the English word.
ALSO GROWS
ka'av: To feel pain or ache.
כָּאַב
The verbal form makes the pain an experience being felt, not just an abstract condition.
mak'ov: Pain or suffering.
מַכְאוֹב
This related noun carries the same pain-root into other descriptions of suffering.
THE PATTERN
Pain can remain present through both speech and silence, while the wish for it to depart remains unanswered.
I am mute in stillness. I hold still, even from good, and my ache is stirred.Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his nature. But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it in, and I could not.Likewise the breath also takes hold alongside our weakness, for we do not know what we should pray for as we ought; but the breath itself approaches on our behalf with groans too deep for speech.THE THREAD
So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spoke a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.The Hebrew word translated “grief” here shares its pain-root with the word translated “grief” in Job 2:13. There, the pain is seen in silence; here, the same pain remains whether it is spoken or held in.
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