What Does Job 27:14 Mean?
If his children multiply, it is for the sword, and his seed is not filled with bread.
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
If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword: and his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread.THE KEY
A family can multiply while its future is still being consumed by violence and hunger.
THE MEANING
The verse says that a growing household is not thereby secure: its sons can still face the sword, and its descendants can still lack bread. Increase in number does not cancel the threat of violence or hunger.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a large family or growing legacy guarantees safety and provision.
THE ROOT
לַחֶרֶב
la-cherev
GROWS FROM
חרב
ḥ-r-b
To become dry or desolate.
The word for sword belongs to a root family that also speaks of drying up and desolation. The verse places that desolating force against the hope of a continuing family line.
ALSO GROWS
cherev: Sword
חֶרֶב
This is the weapon named in the verse, bringing violence directly into the household’s future.
charav: To become dry or desolate
חָרַב
This branch opens the sword’s image toward the desolation left in its wake.
chorbah: Ruin or desolation
חָרְבָּה
The same root family connects the sword with the ruin that can overtake what once seemed to be growing.
לֶחֶם
lechem
GROWS FROM
לחם
Bread or food; the same consonants also form words for fighting, though the derivation is debated.
The consonants of the word for bread echo the Hebrew verb for fighting. The verse does not equate food with conflict, but its sound places nourishment beside the violence named by the sword.
ALSO GROWS
lechem: Bread or food
לֶחֶם
This is the nourishment the descendants lack.
lacham: To fight or wage war
לָחַם
Its consonants echo the sword’s violence beside the verse’s word for food.
milchamah: War
מִלְחָמָה
This related form extends the fighting echo into the larger condition that threatens the household.
יִרְבּוּ
yirbu
GROWS FROM
רבה
r-b-h
To increase or become many.
“multiply” in this verse is yirbu. The verse allows the number of children to increase, then sets that increase beside the sword and unsatisfied hunger. More lives in the family do not, by themselves, mean more security.
ALSO GROWS
rav: Many or great
רָב
This names the abundance implied by the multiplying children.
hirbah: To increase or multiply
הִרְבָּה
This verb carries the same idea of increase as the verse’s conditional.
rov: Abundance or a great number
רֹב
This branch makes clear that numerical abundance does not ensure that the descendants are fed.
THE PATTERN
A household’s increase cannot guarantee survival when violence and hunger overtake it.
You shall bear sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours; for they shall go into captivity.And they shall eat your harvest and your bread, which your sons and your daughters should eat. They shall eat your flocks and your herds. They shall eat your vines and your fig trees. They shall dispossess your fenced cities, upon which you lean your full weight, with the sword.And I see, and look, a grass-green horse, and the name of the one seated upon it is Death, and Hades follows with him. And power is given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
I have been young, and now I am old; yet I have not seen the aligned one left, nor his seed seeking bread.Both verses place descendants beside the same Hebrew word for bread, לֶחֶם (lechem). Job pictures offspring who lack it; the psalm offers the counter-image of a seed not begging for it, making provision part of what a household’s future means.
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