What Does Job 31:3 Mean?
Is not calamity for the crooked, and a stranger's reckoning for the workers of crookedness?
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
Is not destruction to the wicked? and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?THE KEY
The verse presents destruction as the harvest of injustice already being worked, not an unrelated event.
THE MEANING
Right now, the verse names destruction as the consequence attached to injustice, and calls that consequence strange, an alien thing. It gives wrongdoing the shape of work: something actively done, with an outcome.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that injustice can be practiced as harmless work, with its consequences kept separate from the worker.
THE ROOT
פֹּעֲלֵי
poʿalei
GROWS FROM
פעל
To do, make, or work.
The verse calls these people workers of iniquity, giving wrongdoing the shape of something actively made. The root keeps attention on the work being done and its outcome, not only on a label attached to a person.
ALSO GROWS
poʿel: One who works or acts.
פֹּעֵל
The same root names the person by the activity, making the verse’s focus on what is done concrete.
peʿullah: Work, a deed, or its pay.
פְּעֻלָּה
This branch can name both the work and what it yields, echoing the verse’s pairing of workers with destruction.
נֵכֶר
neker
GROWS FROM
נכר
To recognize or regard as foreign; foreignness or strangeness.
“a stranger's reckoning” in this verse is neker. The word translated “strange” carries the sense of something foreign or alien. The consequence is presented as more than ordinary trouble: it is an outcome marked as strange.
ALSO GROWS
nokri: Someone regarded as foreign or outside one’s own group.
נָכְרִי
This branch makes the word’s alien quality vivid: the punishment is described as strange, something foreign.
hikkir: To recognize or distinguish.
הִכִּיר
This branch links foreignness with recognition: something is marked as strange when it is distinguished as other.
THE PATTERN
The fruit of a path follows the work planted along it, even when the consequence is not immediate.
The one who sows crookedness reaps emptiness, and the rod of his overflow runs out.For the LORD perceives the way of the aligned, but the way of the wicked loses its way.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
When the wicked bloom like grass, and the workers of crookedness blossom, it is for their destruction to the ages.Psalm 92:7 repeats the Hebrew phrase פֹּעֲלֵי אָוֶן (poʿalei aven, “workers of iniquity”). It holds apparent flourishing and destruction together, opening Job’s claim as a pattern in which the work and its outcome may not appear at the same time.
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