What Does Job 31:10 Mean?
Then let my wife grind for another, and let others kneel over her.
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
Then let my wife grind unto another, and let others bow down upon her.THE KEY
The oath turns a man’s hidden sexual boundary-crossing into a scene where his wife is placed under another’s labor and bodily power.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks through a severe oath: the speaker imagines his wife grinding for another and men kneeling over her. Its image is starkly asymmetrical, the cost of a man’s desire lands on a woman’s body. The verse makes sexual betrayal an embodied consequence, not a private thought sealed away from others.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that sexual betrayal stays contained in private desire: the oath imagines it spilling into another person’s labor, body, and exposure.
THE ROOT
יִכְרְעוּן
yikhre'un
GROWS FROM
כרע
k-r-ʿ
To bend at the knee; to kneel or crouch.
“kneel” in this verse is yikhre'un. The root names a bodily posture, and the phrase places the men “upon her.” In this oath, that position carries sexual force and subjection; the image is of a body under others’ power, not a gesture of reverence.
ALSO GROWS
kāraʿ: To bend the knee; to kneel.
כָּרַע
This is the root’s basic bodily movement, still present in the men’s posture here.
keraʿayim: Legs; limbs used for standing or bending.
כְּרָעַיִם
This related body word keeps the root’s concrete anatomy in view: kneeling is a position made by limbs.
תִּטְחַן
titḥan
GROWS FROM
טחן
ṭ-ḥ-n
To grind or crush, especially grain into meal.
The root retains the ordinary labor of grinding even in this verse’s sexualized image. English can make “grind unto another” sound like an opaque phrase; the root holds together the wife’s assigned labor and the bodily subjection that follows.
ALSO GROWS
ṭōḥănîm: Grinders; people who grind.
טֹחֲנִים
Ecclesiastes 12:3 uses this form for the people doing the work, echoing the wife being assigned to another’s labor.
haṭṭəḥānāh: The grinding.
הַטְּחָנָה
Ecclesiastes 12:4 uses this form for the sound of grinding, preserving the everyday mill work inside Job’s darker image.
לְאַחֵר
le'aḥer
GROWS FROM
אחר
ʾ-ḥ-r
Behind or after; other, another.
“another / others” in this verse is le'aḥer. The same root appears twice, first for “another” and then for “others.” The Hebrew repeats the movement of the wife from the speaker’s household into another’s sphere, then broadens the scene to a group.
ALSO GROWS
ʾaḥar: After; behind.
אַחַר
This branch carries the root’s sense of what comes after or stands behind.
ʾaḥer: Other; another.
אַחֵר
This is the word used for the man to whom the wife is assigned, echoed by the plural “others.”
THE PATTERN
Sexual trespass crosses relational boundaries and carries consequences into bodies and households.
There is none greater in this house than I, and he has held back nothing from me but you, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great evil, and miss the mark against God?So is the one who goes in to his companion's wife; no one who touches her comes away clear.Flee the selling of bodies. Every shortcoming that a person does is outside the body; but the one who sells bodies misses the mark against his own body.THE THREAD
But the Philistines gripped him, and dug out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with bronze chains. And he was grinding in the prison house.Job and Judges share טחן (ṭ-ḥ-n, “grind”): here a wife is assigned to another, while Samson is forced to grind in captivity. The shared root keeps imposed labor and bodily subjection in view beneath Job’s sexualized image.
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