What Does Job 6:2 Mean?
Oh that my vexation were weighed, and my grief lifted together onto the scales!
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
Oh that my grief were throughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!THE KEY
The verse puts grief on a scale, insisting that what is invisible still has weight.
THE MEANING
Grief here is a burden whose full measure has not yet been seen. The verse places inward pain and outward calamity on the same scales, where neither can be minimized by weighing it alone.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that suffering is exaggerated or weightless because its full measure cannot be seen from the outside.
THE ROOT
יִשָּׁקֵל
yishaqel
GROWS FROM
שקל
To weigh; to measure by weight.
The verb comes from the same root as the shekel, a unit of weight, and mishqal, meaning weight or measure by weight. Job frames grief as something real enough to register on a scale, then asks that grief and calamity be weighed together.
ALSO GROWS
sheqel: A shekel, a unit of weight.
שֶׁקֶל
The same root gives the name of a weight-unit, grounding Job’s plea in material measurement.
mishqal: Weight; a measure by weight.
מִשְׁקָל
This branch makes explicit the measure Job wants applied to his combined grief and calamity.
כַּעְשִׂי
kaʿasi
GROWS FROM
כעס
To be vexed or provoked; vexation, anger, or grief.
The word for grief carries the root’s sense of vexation: distress that troubles and stirs a person. Its pairing with calamity gives the scale both an inward anguish and an outward blow.
ALSO GROWS
kaʿas: Vexation, anger, or grief.
כַּעַס
This noun shares the root of Job’s grief and keeps its troubled, stirred quality visible.
hikʿis: To provoke or anger.
הִכְעִיס
This verbal branch shows the root also names what stirs vexation, adding the sense of distress that has been aggravated.
THE PATTERN
Weighing makes hidden realities legible by giving them their true measure.
Surely the children of humankind are vapor, and the sons of man are a streambed gone dry. In the scales they rise, together lighter than vapor.All the ways of a person are clean in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the breaths.For our light pressure, which is for a moment, works for us a heavy weight, the weight of the ages, overflowing measure upon measure.THE THREAD
Who measures the waters in the hollow of his hand, marks out heaven with a hand's span, holds the dust of the earth in a measuring basket, weighs the mountains in the scales, and the hills in the balance?Isaiah’s verb יִשְׁקֹל (yishqol, weighs) comes from the same root שקל (shaqal, to weigh) as Job’s plea. Here the same weighing language holds mountains and hills, placing Job’s inward calamity within a vocabulary capacious enough to measure the immense.
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