What Does Job 18:13 Mean?
It eats the pieces of his skin, and the firstborn of death eats his hands.
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
It shall devour the strength of his skin: even the firstborn of death shall devour his strength.THE KEY
Death is pictured as a parent whose firstborn carries its consuming force into the body.
THE MEANING
The verse names a consuming force that reaches the body’s covering and its strength. Death appears as a parent, with its firstborn as the active force doing the consuming.
THE ROOT
יֹאכַל
yōkhal
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
eat, consume
“eats” in this verse is yōkhal. Behind “devour” is the ordinary verb “eat,” repeated for both phrases: the force consumes the body’s covering and its strength. The image is bodily and immediate.
ALSO GROWS
ʾokhel: food
אֹכֶל
The same root names what is eaten, linking the act of consumption with its object.
maʾakhal: food, something edible
מַאֲכָל
This branch keeps the root’s sense of eating concrete: something is taken into and consumed.
בְּכוֹר
bekhor
GROWS FROM
בכר
b-k-r
be first; be the firstborn or first to emerge
The phrase gives death a generative image: its firstborn is the foremost thing it brings forth, and that offspring itself devours. This root also names birthright and firstfruits, carrying both sequence and primacy.
ALSO GROWS
bekhorah: birthright, firstborn status
בְּכוֹרָה
It shows that “firstborn” can carry a position of precedence as well as an order of birth.
bikkurim: firstfruits
בִּכּוּרִים
It extends the root’s idea of what emerges first to the earliest yield.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures death as feeding and swallowing, then imagines death itself being swallowed.
Like sheep they are set in the grave, and death shepherds them; the straight ones tread over them in the morning, and their shape wears away in the grave, far from its dwelling.He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord GOD will wipe tears from all faces, and he will remove the taunt of his people from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.But when this decaying thing has clothed itself in what does not decay, and this dying thing in what does not die, then the written word will come to pass, Death has been swallowed into victory.THE THREAD
I will also set him as firstborn, above the kings of the earth.“Firstborn” is the same Hebrew word, בְּכוֹר (bekhor), from the root בכר (b-k-r), meaning firstborn or first to emerge. Here it names a position of primacy; in Job, death’s firstborn is the foremost force death brings forth.
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