What Does Job 4:10 Mean?
The roar of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions are pulled out.
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
The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions, are broken.THE KEY
The verse gathers the lion’s roar, voice, and teeth into one force, then declares the whole display broken.
THE MEANING
The threat is more than a bite: it is the roar that announces the bite, the voice that fills the space, and the teeth that can tear. Here all of it is broken, so the display of danger and its means of harm collapse together. What appears to be one unstoppable force can be dismantled at its source.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A threat’s loudness proves its power is permanent. This verse breaks that equation: the roar and the teeth themselves can be broken.
THE ROOT
שִׁנֵּי
shinnê
GROWS FROM
שׁנן
sh-n-n
To sharpen or whet; the word for tooth carries the image of a sharp, cutting edge.
The Hebrew word for teeth belongs to the same word family as “sharpen,” and the related verb can describe teaching diligently, as though words are honed and pressed in. Here that edge is broken: the lion loses the capacity to tear that its teeth represent.
ALSO GROWS
shen: Tooth; a sharp, biting edge.
שֵׁן
This related form makes the teeth the lion’s means of tearing, not incidental anatomy.
shānan: To sharpen or whet; figuratively, to teach diligently.
שָׁנַן
The sharpening image exposes what is broken in the verse: the lion’s cutting force has lost its edge.
THE PATTERN
Threatening power is shown as breakable at the source, the mouth, teeth, or hold by which it harms.
O God, break their teeth in their mouth; shatter the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD.My God sent his messenger, and shut the lions' mouths, so that they have not harmed me, for before him cleanness was found in me, and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.Since then the children share in common flesh and blood, he likewise shared in those same things with them, so that through death he might make idle the one who held the strength of death, the Slanderer.THE THREAD
O God, break their teeth in their mouth; shatter the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD.The Hebrew phrase שִׁנֵּי כְּפִירִים (shinnê kefirim, “teeth of young lions”) repeats Job’s pairing of teeth and young lions. Psalm 58 turns the same image into a plea to break what Job says is broken, making the lion’s bite a measure of its force.
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