What Does Job 35:7 Mean?
If you are aligned, what do you give him? Or what does he take from your hand?
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
If thou be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand?THE KEY
Your alignment is not a payment that adds to God or puts him in your debt.
THE MEANING
Your alignment does not fill a lack in God; nothing from your hand supplies him. The question breaks the idea that rightness is a transaction whose value depends on what it earns from God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief this undoes is that God needs your righteousness or owes you because of it.
THE ROOT
צָדַקְתָּ
tsadaqta
GROWS FROM
צדק
Be aligned; be in the right.
“aligned” in this verse is tsadaqta. The root holds rightness and the conduct of a right person in one family; צְדָקָה (tsedaqah) can also mean charitable giving. The question asks whether even right action and generosity make God their beneficiary.
ALSO GROWS
tsedeq: Rightness, justice, alignment.
צֶדֶק
It shows that being righteous belongs to a wider word family about what is rightly aligned.
tsedaqah: Righteousness; an act of charitable giving.
צְדָקָה
Its association with giving sharpens the question: even generosity does not supply God.
tsaddiq: A righteous or aligned person.
צַדִּיק
It names the person whose alignment is being considered in the verse.
תִּתֵּן
tittēn
GROWS FROM
נתן
Give, put, set.
“give” in this verse is tittēn. The root carries both giving and placing. The verse asks whether anything a person places before God adds to what God has; its parallel question about what God takes from a human hand makes the issue one of divine dependence.
ALSO GROWS
yitten: He gives.
יִתֵּן
This form from the same root echoes the verse’s question about giving.
mattan: A gift.
מַתָּן
It makes explicit the idea of something given, while the verse asks whether such a gift supplies God.
THE PATTERN
Human rightness adds nothing to God’s fullness, while its effects are real among people.
O living soul, you say to the LORD, "You are my Lord; my goodness does not reach beyond you."If I hungered, I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and what fills it.Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, for he himself gives to all life and breath and all things.THE THREAD
Your wickedness may harm a man like you, and your alignment may profit the son of man.The same Hebrew root, צָדַק (tsadaq, be aligned or in the right), names the righteousness whose benefit reaches another person in the next verse. Your alignment does not add to God, yet its effects are real among people.
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