What Does Job 30:31 Mean?
My lyre becomes mourning, and my flute the voice of the weepers.
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
My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep.THE KEY
The harp does not fall silent; its sound is taken over by the voice of grief.
THE MEANING
When grief fills your life, even what once carried delight can take on its sound. The harp is turned to mourning, and the pipe becomes the voice of those who weep; sorrow now occupies the music itself.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that grief is only the absence of song: here grief has a voice, and music carries it.
THE ROOT
בֹּכִים
bōkhîm
GROWS FROM
בכה
To weep or cry.
The harp does not merely accompany people who are weeping: it becomes their קול, their voice, as grief enters the music itself. English separates the instrument’s sound from the weepers, while the verse brings them into one expression of sorrow.
ALSO GROWS
bākāh: To weep.
בָּכָה
The verb names the action carried by the weepers in this verse.
bekhî: Weeping.
בְּכִי
This noun gives the sound of the harp a name for the grief it now carries.
bōkhe: One who weeps.
בֹּכֶה
This participle shows the weeper as someone presently expressing grief, not as a label detached from the act.
THE PATTERN
Sorrow makes itself audible, from a person’s changed music to creation’s groaning.
The joy of our heart has stopped; our dance has been overturned into mourning.We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it.For we know that the whole creation groans together and labors together in the pangs of birth until now.THE THREAD
We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it.The word translated “harp” is the same Hebrew noun, כִּנּוֹר (kinnōr), meaning harp or lyre, in both verses. Job’s harp gives grief a voice; the psalm’s harps hang silent among the willows.
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