What Does Job 4:2 Mean?
If someone tests a word with you, will you grow weary? But who can hold back the words?
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 we assay to commune with thee, wilt thou be grieved? but who can withhold himself from speaking?THE KEY
The conversation begins as one davar, a word or matter brought toward you, and ends by asking whether words can be restrained at all.
THE MEANING
A word comes toward you with the awareness that it may weary or grieve you. The verse keeps the listener’s cost in view even as the speaker admits that words may not be containable. Its question leaves the tension open: wanting to spare someone does not always make speech stop.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that seeing another person may be hurt is enough to make a difficult word stay unsaid.
THE ROOT
דָּבָר
dāḇār
GROWS FROM
דבר
Word, matter, or speech.
“a word with you” in this verse is dāḇār. The KJV’s “commune” makes the opening sound like an abstract exchange, while davar is a word or matter set toward someone. That concrete word leads into the ending’s question about whether words can be restrained: a conversation begins with one utterance and opens into the pressure of speech.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: to speak, utter
דִּבֵּר
This verb from the same root shows that davar can be both the word offered and the act of speaking.
devarim: words, matters
דְּבָרִים
The root carries speech and its content together, giving the opening word the weight of something brought into the relationship.
תִּלְאֶה
tilʾeh
GROWS FROM
לאה
Grow weary, become tired.
“grow weary” in this verse is tilʾeh. The response feared here is framed as weariness as well as hurt. Jeremiah 20:9 uses this same root for “I was weary” while trying to hold back speech, making the strain of restraint itself visible.
ALSO GROWS
lāʾāh: to grow weary
לָאָה
This verb names the weariness the listener may feel in receiving the word.
nilʾēti: I became weary
נִלְאֵיתִי
Jeremiah uses this form for weariness while trying to forbear, linking the cost of hearing with the cost of holding speech in.
וַעְצֹר
veʿatzor
GROWS FROM
עצר
Restrain, hold back, detain.
“withhold” in this verse is veʿatzor. In Hebrew, restraint is attached directly to “words” in the phrase that follows. The root also carries the sense of detention or confinement, so speech is pictured as something actively held in.
ALSO GROWS
ʿāṣar: to restrain, detain, hold back
עָצַר
This verb names the attempted restraint at the heart of the verse’s closing question.
maʿatsar: detention, confinement
מַעְצָר
This noun from the same root makes the image of words held in even more concrete.
THE PATTERN
What presses a person to speak can outlast an attempt to hold words back.
Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his nature. But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it in, and I could not.For we cannot keep from speaking what we have perceived and heard.THE THREAD
Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his nature. But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it in, and I could not.Job’s “grow weary” (תִּלְאֶה, tilʾeh) and Jeremiah’s “I was weary” (נִלְאֵיתִי, nilʾēti) share the root לאה; Job’s “word” (דָּבָר, davar) also shares the root דבר with Jeremiah’s “his word” and “speak.” Jeremiah makes the strain visible: trying to hold speech in can itself become wearisome, until words break through.
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