What Does Job 7:5 Mean?
My flesh wears worms and a clod of dust; my skin hardens and splits open, and is spurned.
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
My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.THE KEY
Decay does not stand outside the body here; it becomes the clothing the body wears.
THE MEANING
Here, suffering reaches the body’s surface: flesh is covered with worms and clods of dust, skin is broken, and the body becomes loathsome. The verse holds bodily damage in direct language, without disguising it as something else.
THE ROOT
לָבַשׁ
lāvaš
GROWS FROM
לבש
To clothe, put on, or wear.
The verse turns the ordinary image of wearing clothes inside out: worms and dust are what the flesh wears. The body has no protective separation from decay; its covering is part of the affliction.
ALSO GROWS
levush: Garment, clothing.
לְבוּשׁ
The noun makes the verse’s clothing image concrete: worms and dust become the garment covering the flesh.
hilbish: To clothe someone.
הִלְבִּישׁ
This form shows the root can describe clothing placed on another; here, what covers the body is itself a source of suffering.
וַיִּמָּאֵס
vayyimmāʾēs
GROWS FROM
מאס
To reject, refuse, or despise.
“is spurned” in this verse is vayyimmāʾēs. English presents loathsomeness as a quality, while the Hebrew root also carries the sense of rejection or refusal. It gives the body’s condition the force of something that provokes turning away.
ALSO GROWS
maʾas: To reject or refuse.
מָאַס
This verb reveals the root’s active sense beneath the body’s state of being loathsome.
maʾus: Rejected, despised, or abhorrent.
מָאוּס
This form brings the rejection and revulsion close to the description of the damaged body.
THE PATTERN
The body remains earthbound: scripture names dust as both its material and a sign of its fragility.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you turn back to the ground, for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall turn back.For he perceives our shape; he remembers that we are dust.But we hold this treasure in clay vessels, so that the overflow of strength may be of God and not from us.THE THREAD
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you turn back to the ground, for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall turn back.Job 7:5 puts עָפָר (ʿāfār, dust or soil) on the skin as clods. Genesis 3:19 uses that same word for what the human is and what the human returns to, so the dust on the surface echoes the body’s material and destination.
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