What Does Job 22:5 Mean?
Is not your harm great, and is there no end to your crooked deeds?
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
Is not thy wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite?THE KEY
“Great” and “without end” turn a charge of wrongdoing into a total portrait, making its scale feel like evidence.
THE MEANING
A voice meets you with the charge that your wrongdoing is great and your crookedness has no end. The verse exposes how an accusation can speak as though naming guilt at maximum scale were itself proof. Its question is forceful, but force alone does not establish the charge.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the lie that a severe, confident charge is proof of limitless guilt.
THE ROOT
רַבָּה
rabbāh
GROWS FROM
רבה
Be much, increase, become many.
The word carries the sense of abundance and increase, not only a high degree. Beside “without end,” it makes the accusation swell from great wrongdoing into a claim of boundlessness.
ALSO GROWS
hirbāh: Increase, multiply, make abundant.
הִרְבָּה
This verbal form makes the root’s sense of increase explicit, showing how “great” belongs to a family of growing quantity.
marbeh: Increasing, multiplying; one who increases.
מַרְבֶּה
The same root can describe ongoing increase, echoing how the verse enlarges the accusation.
harbeh: Much, many, abundantly.
הַרְבֵּה
This form makes quantity explicit: the verse’s “great” carries the sense of abundance.
THE PATTERN
The scale or certainty of an accusation does not make it true; a charge must answer to sound judgment.
And it was so, after the LORD had spoken these words to Job, that the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, The burning of my anger is against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken to me the steady thing, as my servant Job has.The aligned one at the head of his own contention seems straight, but his neighbor comes and searches him out.Who will bring any charge against God's chosen ones? It is God who aligns.THE THREAD
And it was so, after the LORD had spoken these words to Job, that the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, The burning of my anger is against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken to me the steady thing, as my servant Job has.The LORD’s reply to Eliphaz says that the friends have not spoken rightly, while calling Job his servant. The sweeping accusation in Job 22:5 sounds like a verdict, yet this answer reveals that its certainty does not make it true.
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