What Does Job 5:26 Mean?
You come to your grave in ripeness, as a shock of grain comes up in its season.
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
Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season.THE KEY
The grave is pictured as harvest’s gathering: a life brought to fullness in its season.
THE MEANING
Your life is pictured here as reaching the grave at fullness, like grain gathered when its season arrives. The image holds death in view while giving the ending a season and a measure.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The grave is not pictured only as an interruption; here it is also a gathering at ripeness.
THE ROOT
גָּדִישׁ
gādīsh
GROWS FROM
גדשׁ
To heap up or pile together.
“shock” in this verse is gādīsh. The Hebrew word is a heap or stack of grain, gathered into one mass at harvest. That makes the comparison more than a picture of old age: the ending is imagined as a life gathered into fullness, while the grave remains plainly in view.
ALSO GROWS
gādīsh: A stack or heap of grain.
גָּדִישׁ
This is the word translated “shock”; it makes the harvest image a gathered bundle, not a single stalk.
gādaš: To heap up or pile.
גָּדַשׁ
The verb carries the root’s gathering-together sense into the image of grain accumulated for harvest.
THE PATTERN
Scripture uses harvest to picture fullness arriving in its season, with gathering following ripeness.
And he becomes like a tree planted by the channels of the waters, that gives its fruit in its season; its leaf does not wither; whatever he does, he breaks through.A time to bear, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.But when the fruit is handed over, straightway he sends out the sickle, because the harvest is standing here.THE THREAD
If fire goes out and catches in thorns, so that heaped grain, or standing grain, or the field, is eaten with it, the one who kindled the fire shall surely make it whole.The same Hebrew word, גָּדִישׁ (gādīsh), names the grain stack in both verses. Job pictures the stack arriving at its season; Exodus shows that a stack can also be consumed by fire, holding ripeness beside the vulnerability of what has been gathered.
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