What Does Job 31:14 Mean?
What then shall I do when God rises up? And when he visits, what shall I answer him?
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
What then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer him?THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “answer” comes from “return”: when God attends to a life, the question is what comes back from it.
THE MEANING
God’s attention reaches your conduct, and your answer is not separate from the life it comes from. In the surrounding lines, the treatment of servants and the vulnerable stands within that same account.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that words can answer God while the life behind them remains outside the reckoning.
THE ROOT
אֲשִׁיבֶנּוּ
ʾashivennu
GROWS FROM
שׁוב
To turn back, return.
The verb translated “answer” is formed from the root for returning. The reply is pictured as something brought back to the one who asks, opening the question beyond a spoken response: what returns from the life you have lived?
ALSO GROWS
shuv: Turn, return.
שׁוּב
This is the root action beneath the answer: something turns back toward its source.
heshiv: Bring back, restore; answer or respond.
הֵשִׁיב
This related form shows how “answer” carries the shape of bringing something back in response.
יִפְקֹד
yifqod
GROWS FROM
פקד
Attend to, take account of, muster.
“visiteth” in this verse is yifqod. This root holds attentive visitation and reckoning within the same range: God turns toward a life closely enough to attend to it. That makes Job’s question sharper, the one who is seen cannot reduce the answer to a prepared sentence.
ALSO GROWS
pequddah: Oversight, charge, appointed responsibility.
פְּקֻדָּה
Its sense of oversight shows that this visitation involves close attention to what has been entrusted.
paqîd: Officer, overseer.
פָּקִיד
This branch names one charged with oversight, echoing the root’s sense of attending to what is under one’s care.
THE PATTERN
God’s attention brings the whole lived life, including what is hidden, into account.
For God brings every making into judgment, upon every hidden thing, whether good or harm.So then each of us shall give an account of himself to God.And no creation is hidden before him, but all things are naked and bared at the throat to the eyes of him to whom our account belongs.THE THREAD
And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as he had spoken.“Visited” here uses the same פקד (paqad, attend to) root as Job’s verse. Its attention fulfills what was spoken, widening the word: when God turns toward a life, the visitation can bring promise into being.
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