What Does Job 31:8 Mean?
Then let me sow, and let another eat; and let my sprouts be uprooted.
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 me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out.THE KEY
Hebrew names the descendants “those who come forth” and immediately threatens them with being uprooted; the line sets emergence against severance.
THE MEANING
The oath holds two losses together: another eats what you sow, and your descendants are uprooted. It reaches from the harvest of your labor to the generations who come from you, exposing both to loss under the same conditional claim.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that planting guarantees possession of the harvest: the verse names another eating what you sow.
THE ROOT
יְשֹׁרָשׁוּ
yeshorashu
GROWS FROM
שרשׁ
sh-r-sh
Root; strike root or take root. Here the form means to be uprooted.
“uprooted” in this verse is yeshorashu. The threat is not merely that the descendants disappear, but that they are severed at the root. The word puts rootedness, the source of continued growth, at the center of the loss.
ALSO GROWS
shoresh: root
שֹׁרֶשׁ
The noun names the underground anchor of a plant, making clear what the threat removes.
hishrish: take root; root deeply
הִשְׁרִישׁ
The same word-family can describe establishment and its reversal, placing growth and uprooting in one shared image.
זָרַעְתִּי
zara'ti
GROWS FROM
זרע
z-r-ʿ
Sow or scatter seed.
“sow” in this verse is zara'ti. The root’s noun form, zera, can mean both seed and offspring, so Hebrew can hold crop and lineage in one word-family. Job uses a different word for “offspring” here, but the seed-language still echoes the verse’s two threatened forms of growth.
ALSO GROWS
zera: seed; offspring
זֶרַע
This noun shows how the sowing root can extend from planted seed to descendants.
zorea: one who sows; a sower
זֹרֵעַ
It names the person who plants, sharpening the verse’s separation between the sower and the one who eats.
צֶאֱצָאַי
tse'etsa'ai
GROWS FROM
יצא
y-ts-ʾ
Go out; come forth.
“sprouts” in this verse is tse'etsa'ai. The descendants are named as those who come forth, then the next clause says they will be uprooted. The neighboring words set emergence against the loss of what allows life to remain rooted.
ALSO GROWS
yatsa: go out; come forth
יָצָא
This verb reveals the image inside the word for descendants: they are those who have come forth.
motsa: going out; source or origin
מוֹצָא
This noun carries the same movement outward, echoing the descendants as a line that proceeds from someone.
THE PATTERN
The person who plants or labors can be separated from what that labor yields when injustice or judgment governs the outcome.
You will sow, but you will not reap; you will tread the olives, but you will not smear yourself with oil; and new wine, but you will not drink wine.You shall betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house, and you shall not settle in it. You shall plant a vineyard, and you shall not eat of it.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
For they sow breath, and they will reap the whirlwind. It has no stalk. The sprout will yield no meal. If it yields, strangers will swallow it up.The Hebrew word for sowing in both verses comes from זרע (z-r-ʿ), “to sow.” Hosea extends Job’s image: what is sown becomes a yield that strangers swallow.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us