What Does Job 31:40 Mean?
Instead of wheat, let thorns come out, and instead of barley, let stinkweed come up. The words of Job are used up.
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
Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley. The words of Job are ended.THE KEY
The field becomes a witness: nourishing grain may give way to thorn and stench as its verdict.
THE MEANING
A claim of integrity stands exposed to what the ground yields: if the land has been wronged, nourishment gives way to thorn and foul growth. The harvest becomes a verdict, and the words stop there.
THE ROOT
בָּאְשָׁה
bāʾushāh
GROWS FROM
ב־א־ש
b-ʾ-sh
To stink or become foul.
“stinkweed” in this verse is bāʾushāh. The plant-name translated cockle carries the sense of a stinking growth. Barley is displaced not just by another plant, but by a foul thing; the loss of nourishment becomes something the senses can detect.
ALSO GROWS
bāʾash: To stink, become foul.
בָּאַשׁ
This verb makes explicit the foulness carried by the plant-name.
hibʾîsh: To cause to stink, make foul.
הִבְאִישׁ
The causative form sharpens the image: the replacement crop makes the field’s yield offensive.
יֵצֵא
yēṣēʾ
GROWS FROM
י־צ־א
y-ṣ-ʾ
To go out, come forth.
“come out” in this verse is yēṣēʾ. The verb rendered grow presents the weed as what comes out of the ground. This root also forms words for an exit and an outlet, so the field’s output itself changes from food to thorn and foul growth.
ALSO GROWS
yəṣîʾāh: Going out, an exit.
יְצִיאָה
It shares the sense of something emerging or passing out, as the crop comes forth from the soil.
môṣāʾ: An outlet, source, or what comes out.
מוֹצָא
It makes the field’s yield legible as its output: what emerges can nourish or wound.
THE PATTERN
The harvest can embody the consequence of what has been sown or done.
Thorns also and thistles shall it sprout for you, and you shall eat the grass of the field.Even as I have seen, those who plow crookedness and sow toil reap it.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
And the earth brought out green growth, the seed-bearing plant after its kind, and the fruit tree making fruit, whose seed is in it, after its kind. And God saw that it was good.The shared root is יָצָא (yāṣāʾ, to come out or go forth): Genesis describes the earth bringing food forth, while Job imagines the same ground bringing thorn and foul growth instead. The ending turns the ground’s generative output from nourishment toward loss.
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