What Does Job 20:16 Mean?
He sucks the venom of asps; the tongue of the viper strikes him down.
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
He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper’s tongue shall slay him.THE KEY
The poison he draws into himself and the viper’s killing tongue form one continuous image of destruction.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks now of harm entering through what is taken in and arriving through a viper’s lethal strike. It holds both images as bodily and immediate: poison is swallowed, and death is dealt by the tongue.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what is swallowed becomes harmless once inside, or that a tongue can only wound figuratively: here poison is ingested and the tongue kills.
THE ROOT
יִינָק
yināq
GROWS FROM
ינק
y-n-q
to draw in by sucking or suckle
“sucks” in this verse is yināq. The same verb can describe a child drawing milk, but here the mouth draws venom. An act associated with feeding becomes the route by which poison enters him.
ALSO GROWS
yanaq: to suck or suckle
יָנַק
It names the same drawing-in action, making the verse’s intake of poison vivid.
yoneq: a suckling or young shoot
יוֹנֵק
The word can describe one who draws nourishment; here that act of intake carries poison instead.
לְשׁוֹן
leshōn
GROWS FROM
לשן
l-sh-n
tongue, and by extension language
The Hebrew noun names both the physical tongue and a language. Here it is literally the viper’s lethal organ, while its other sense keeps speech close to the image without erasing the verse’s bodily violence.
ALSO GROWS
lashon: the physical tongue
לָשׁוֹן
This is the viper’s organ in the verse, pictured as the instrument of death.
leshonot: tongues or languages
לְשׁוֹנוֹת
The plural carries the same noun into the sense of languages, connecting the bodily tongue with speech.
THE PATTERN
Destruction can be taken in or carried in the mouth until it turns lethal.
Their wine is the burning of dragons, and the cruel poison of asps.At its afterward it bites like a serpent, and like an adder it spreads itself out.But the tongue no one is able to tame; it is an evil that will not stand still, full of death-bearing venom.THE THREAD
Yet his bread in his bowels is overturned; it is the venom of asps within him.The Hebrew noun פְּתָנִים (pethanim), meaning asps, appears in both verses. Here the poison is already within him; the next verse shows him drawing it in and being killed by the viper’s tongue.
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