What Does Job 6:7 Mean?
The things my living soul refuses to touch are like the sickness of my bread.
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 things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat.THE KEY
The Hebrew “soul” is the living, appetitive self, and its food is likened to sickness, so sorrow has reached the place where life receives nourishment.
THE MEANING
When the living self cannot receive what normally sustains it, sorrow reaches appetite itself. Here food is pictured with sickness, making nourishment hard to bear.
THE ROOT
נַפְשִׁי
nafshi
GROWS FROM
נפש
n-p-sh
to rest or refresh oneself
“my living soul” in this verse is nafshi. Nefesh means the living soul: the whole living self, including its appetite. When this self refuses food, the verse places sorrow in a person’s lived, bodily experience.
ALSO GROWS
naphash: to rest, be refreshed
נָפַשׁ
Exodus 23:12 uses this verb for rest and refreshment; the shared root places nefesh within a living creature’s capacity to be restored.
nephesh: living being, person, appetite
נֶפֶשׁ
This range lets “my soul refused” name the whole living self, including its appetite.
דְּוֵי
dəwê
GROWS FROM
דוה
d-w-h
to be sick, ill, or languish
“the sickness of my bread” in this verse is dəwê. The word rendered “sorrowful” comes from a sickness-root, giving the phrase a bodily edge: the food is like the sickness of his bread. Grief appears within nourishment itself, as what should sustain the living self becomes sickening.
ALSO GROWS
dāwāh: to be sick or languish
דָּוָה
Lamentations 5:17 uses this form for the heart’s sickness, showing how the root can express grief as illness.
dāweh: sick, ill
דָּוֶה
This related form names a sick or languishing state; in Job, that sickness shades the image of food itself.
THE PATTERN
Scripture ties appetite to the condition of the living self, showing that hunger, refusal, and even forgetting to eat belong to the whole person.
My heart is struck and dries like grass, for I forget to eat my bread.The filled living soul tramples dripping honey, but to the hungry living soul every bitter thing is sweet.Therefore I say to you, do not be pulled apart over your living soul, over what you will eat or what you will drink, nor over your body, over what you will put on. Is not the living soul more than food, and the body more than clothing?THE THREAD
So his life recoils from bread, and his living soul from the food of craving.Job 33:20 places the same word, נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh; living soul), beside food the living self abhors. The shared root makes clear that “soul” here includes the appetite that turns away from nourishment.
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