What Does Isaiah 38:10 Mean in the King James?
I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave: I am deprived of the residue of my years.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The pain is not only death ahead; it is the sense of years left over that will never be lived.
THE MEANING
Here, the speaker sees himself approaching the gates of the grave while his years still feel unfinished. The grief holds two losses together: life ending, and the years he expected to have being taken from him.
THE ROOT
דְּמִי
demi
GROWS FROM
דמם
damam
To become silent or still; to cease.
The Hebrew phrase carries the sense of stillness or cessation in the speaker’s days; the KJV’s “cutting off” gives that silence the felt force of a severing. The verse thus holds the quieting of life together with the grief of reaching the grave before one’s years feel spent.
ALSO GROWS
demamah: Silence, stillness.
דְּמָמָה
In 1 Kings 19:12, this root describes the stillness in “a still small voice,” showing that the word can name a quieting, not only an ending.
dom: Be still; be silent.
דּוֹם
Psalm 37:7 uses this same root in “Rest in the LORD”; the shared word links the stillness at life’s boundary with stillness before the LORD.
יֶתֶר
yeter
GROWS FROM
יתר
yatar
To remain over, be left, or exceed.
The residue is what remains beyond what has already passed. Here, the years still left are not an abstraction: they are felt as a remainder the speaker will not reach.
ALSO GROWS
yitron: Gain, profit, or advantage.
יִתְרוֹן
Ecclesiastes uses this branch for what remains as gain from labor, making “the residue of my years” sound like an unspent remainder of a life.
motar: Surplus; what remains.
מוֹתָר
This branch makes the root’s sense of a remainder explicit, illuminating the speaker’s grief over years still left to him.
THE PATTERN
Awareness of life’s limit turns time into something measured and deeply felt.
Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass;LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;THE THREAD
Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.Isaiah’s “cutting off” and Psalm’s “Rest” draw on דמם (damam), the language of stillness and silence. The same root appears at the boundary of life and in stillness before the LORD, joining two experiences beneath one word.
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