What Does Job 24:20 Mean?
The womb forgets him; the worm feeds sweetly on him; he is remembered no more; and crookedness is broken like a tree.
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
The womb shall forget him; the worm shall feed sweetly on him; he shall be no more remembered; and wickedness shall be broken as a tree.THE KEY
Even the womb forgets him, the worm finds him sweet, and wickedness snaps like a tree.
THE MEANING
The verse makes mortality physical and unsentimental: the body becomes worm-food, the person leaves human remembrance, and wickedness breaks. Its image speaks now against the fantasy that wrongdoing can secure a permanent name or hold.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that wickedness can remain rooted and remembered without end.
THE ROOT
רֶחֶם
rechem
GROWS FROM
רחם
To show compassion or tender care; rechem, “womb,” belongs to this word family.
The word for womb shares its root family with words for compassion. That connection deepens the image: even the place associated with life and compassion forgets him.
ALSO GROWS
racham: To show compassion
רָחַם
This verb shares the root that names the womb, joining the images of gestation and compassion in one word family.
rachamim: Compassion, tender mercies
רַחֲמִים
This related word makes the womb’s forgetting feel like a stark absence of the care associated with its root.
יִזָּכֵר
yizzakher
GROWS FROM
זכר
To remember, recall, or bring to mind.
The verse moves from “the womb shall forget him” to “he shall be no more remembered,” using different Hebrew roots for forgetting and remembrance. The second phrase widens the loss from an intimate image to disappearance from memory altogether.
ALSO GROWS
zakar: To remember or call to mind
זָכַר
This verb is the root behind the verse’s statement that he is no longer remembered.
zikkaron: Memorial or remembrance
זִכָּרוֹן
A memorial keeps someone present to memory; the verse describes the opposite.
THE PATTERN
What appears powerful or flourishing can disappear; mortality outlasts its season.
Yet he crossed over, and look, he was not; I sought him, but he could not be found.For the sun rises with its scorching heat, and dries the grass, and its flower falls, and the beauty of its shape perishes; so also the rich one withers in his goings.THE THREAD
For the needy is not always forgotten; the hope of the bowed ones does not perish forever.Job’s “forget him” is יִשְׁכָּחֵהוּ (yishkachehu, “forget him”), from שׁכח (shakhach, “forget”); Psalm 9:18 uses the same root for the needy who will not always be forgotten. The shared root sharpens the contrast: Job depicts the wrongdoer disappearing, while the psalm refuses to let the vulnerable disappear from remembrance.
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