What Does Job 21:12 Mean?
They lift the timbrel and lyre, and rejoice at the sound of the pipe.
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
They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ.THE KEY
The people Job calls wicked can celebrate too, so visible prosperity cannot serve as a verdict on their character.
THE MEANING
Music and gladness can fill lives that do not fit an easy moral scoreboard. This scene lets their joy be real without treating visible ease as proof of innocence or approval. It speaks now whenever suffering is mistaken for guilt or comfort for righteousness.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Ease is not proof that someone is righteous, and suffering is not proof that someone is guilty.
THE ROOT
יִשְׂאוּ
yisʾu
GROWS FROM
נָשָׂא
nasa
Lift, carry, bear; here, they lift or take up the instruments.
The instruments are not simply picked up: yisʾu carries the bodily sense of lifting them into the scene. The same seed can lift a voice or describe bearing crookedness, so the English “take” hides a verb that spans rising sound and what a person carries.
ALSO GROWS
nasa qol: Raise the voice.
נָשָׂא קוֹל
The same verb that carries the instruments can lift a voice into sound; celebration here is physically raised.
bear crookedness: Carry crookedness; this idiom can describe forgiving wrongdoing.
נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן
The seed that carries instruments here can also describe bearing wrongdoing, linking a concrete act of carrying with a moral burden.
THE PATTERN
Joy is often made audible through song, instruments, and the raised voice.
Praise him with the hand-drum and the whirling; praise him with the strings and the pipe.Is anyone among you enduring harm? Let him pray. Is anyone glad-hearted? Let him pluck the strings.Shout to the LORD, all the earth. Burst open, ring out, and make music.THE THREAD
Rejoice in the LORD and leap, you who are aligned, and ring out, all you who are straight of heart.Job’s וְיִשְׂמְחוּ (veyismechu, “and they rejoice”) and Psalm 32:11’s שִׂמְחוּ (simchu, “be glad”) share שָׂמַח (samach, “rejoice, be glad”). The shared root holds the gladness together, while each verse locates it differently.
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