What Does Job 41:20 Mean?
From his nostrils smoke goes out, as from a pot blown and boiling.
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
Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.THE KEY
The pot is blown into heat, so the creature’s nostrils become the image’s bellows.
THE MEANING
Smoke streams from the creature’s nostrils like the smoke of a vessel heated by blowing. You meet a force that makes its presence visible through what it releases.
THE ROOT
נָפוּחַ
naphuach
GROWS FROM
נפח
n-p-ḥ
to blow, puff, or fan
“blown and boiling” in this verse is naphuach. The word rendered “seething” carries the image of a pot blown upon and heated. The same root names both the blowing and the bellows that supply it, linking the vessel’s rising smoke with the force issuing from the creature’s nostrils.
ALSO GROWS
naphach: to blow or puff
נָפַח
This verb names the force that heats the pot and gives the verse its image of smoke rising under pressure.
mappuach: bellows
מַפּוּחַ
The bellows make blowing a source of heat, illuminating how the verse pictures the pot’s smoke as the result of fanning.
THE PATTERN
Blowing makes the force at work visible through its outcome: smoke from heat, or life from what was inert.
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.Then he said to me, Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD, Come from the four winds, O breath, and blow upon these struck ones, that they may live.And when he had said this, he breathed into them, and said to them, Take in the Set-Apart Breath.THE THREAD
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.The pot in Job is described with נָפוּחַ (naphuach), blown upon; Genesis uses the same root when God blows into the human’s nostrils. The shared root joins two outcomes of blowing: smoke rising from a heated vessel, and a human becoming a living soul.
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