What Does Job 34:7 Mean?
What man is like Job, who drinks up scorning like waters?
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 man is like Job, who drinketh up scorning like water?THE KEY
The image turns scorn into sustenance: Job is pictured taking contempt in as readily as water.
THE MEANING
The speaker’s question portrays Job as taking in scorn with the regularity of drinking water. Contempt becomes an inward intake, something received until ridicule feels ordinary.
THE ROOT
לַעַג
laʿag
GROWS FROM
לעג
l-ʿ-g
To mock or deride; to make someone an object of contempt.
“scorning” in this verse is laʿag. This root holds together the act of mocking and the experience of derision. The verse’s drink image gives that human act the force of something received into Job’s inner life.
ALSO GROWS
loʿēg: One who mocks; a mocker.
לֹעֵג
This form keeps the root attached to the person doing the deriding, giving the scorn a human source.
laʿag: Mockery; derision.
לַעַג
This noun names the scorn itself as something Job is pictured as taking in like a drink.
THE PATTERN
Scripture uses eating and drinking to picture an inward reality as something received into a person.
How much more loathsome and ruined is man, who drinks crookedness like the waters?For I eat ashes like bread, and I mix my drink with weeping.The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.THE THREAD
But you, LORD, laugh at them; you mock all the nations.Job 34:7 uses לַעַג (laʿag), meaning derision, for what Job is accused of drinking. Psalm 59:8 uses the same root for the LORD’s derision of hostile nations, showing that this word can carry more than a personal insult.
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