What Does Job 20:19 Mean?
Because he crushes and lets go of the emptied, and tears away a house he did not build.
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
Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not;THE KEY
The verse joins a seized house to the crushing and abandonment of the poor, so the possession itself bears the trace of their dispossession.
THE MEANING
This verse names a pattern that can still take shape now: someone crushes people already made vulnerable, abandons them, and takes a home they did not build. The house stands as visible gain, while its foundation is another person’s dispossession.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that holding what you seize makes it rightfully yours: the house remains bound to the people crushed and abandoned for it.
THE ROOT
רָצַץ
ratsats
GROWS FROM
רצץ
r-ts-ts
to crush, break, or press down
“crushes” in this verse is ratsats. The verb translated “oppressed” belongs to the same root as the word for a “bruised” or crushed reed. Hebrew holds social oppression and physical breaking in one word-family: the powerful person acts by crushing.
ALSO GROWS
ratsats: to crush or oppress
רָצַץ
This is the verb used here: what English renders as oppression carries the force of crushing.
rātsûts: crushed or bruised, as in the bruised reed of Isaiah 42:3
רָצוּץ
The same root describes a thing already bent and broken, sharpening the violence in the treatment of the poor.
דַלִּים
dallim
GROWS FROM
דלל
d-l-l
to be low, weak, or diminished
The word for the poor belongs to a root of being low or diminished. The verse places the crushing of people already described as low alongside the taking of a house.
ALSO GROWS
dal: low, weak, or poor
דַּל
This singular form names the same condition that appears in Job’s plural “poor.”
wayyiddal: he or it was brought low; diminished
וַיִּדַּל
This verb form shows the root’s movement toward being made low, echoing the vulnerability named here.
יִבְנֵהוּ
yivnehuhu
GROWS FROM
בנה
b-n-h
to build or establish
“builded” in this verse is yivnehuhu. The root names the work that establishes a house; its branches name the builder and the building. By saying the taker did not build what he seized, the verse makes the missing labor part of the charge.
ALSO GROWS
boneh: one who builds, a builder
בּוֹנֶה
The builder is explicitly absent from the taking described in the verse.
binyan: a building or structure
בִּנְיָן
This noun from the same root makes the contrast concrete: the structure remains, though the one who took it did not build it.
THE PATTERN
Violence against the vulnerable is exposed by the property it transfers to the powerful.
They covet fields and tear them away, and houses, and carry them off. So they press a man and his house, even a man and his inheritance.Do not tear away from the emptied, for he is emptied; and do not crush the bowed one in the gate.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
Do not tear away from the emptied, for he is emptied; and do not crush the bowed one in the gate.Job calls the poor דַלִּים (dallim, the poor or low); Proverbs uses דַּל (dal, poor), from the same root. That shared word ties both passages’ warning to the person made vulnerable, not just to the property taken.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us