What Does Job 14:11 Mean in the King James?
As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up:
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 verse names even the sea’s waters as arriving at an end, turning apparent abundance into a picture of finitude.
THE MEANING
You live inside a life whose visible supports, even when vast, are not inexhaustible. The verse shows what once held water losing it, until the river itself is dry. It names finitude without explaining it away.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that something vast cannot end.
THE ROOT
כָּלוּ
kalu
GROWS FROM
כלה
k-l-h
To be finished, spent, or brought to an end.
The word rendered “fail” pictures the waters coming to their end. The root can describe something being spent or finished, making their disappearance a limit reached, not merely a change of location.
ALSO GROWS
kalah: To finish, be complete, or come to an end.
כָּלָה
This verbal form makes the waters’ failure an arrival at an endpoint.
takhlit: An end, limit, or completion.
תַּכְלִית
This related noun names a limit, echoing the verse’s image of water reaching its end.
נָהָר
nahar
GROWS FROM
נהר
n-h-r
To flow or stream; the root also carries the sense of shining or beaming.
The Hebrew word beneath “flood” is a river, a channel of moving water. Its root carries the sense of flow, so the verse shows not only water disappearing but movement coming to a halt.
ALSO GROWS
neharim: Rivers or streams.
נְהָרִים
The plural keeps the image focused on channels of flowing water, like the river that dries in the verse.
nahar: To flow or stream; also to shine or beam.
נָהַר
The river’s root carries flow within it; when the river dries, that movement is gone.
יָבֵשׁ
yavesh
GROWS FROM
יבש
y-b-sh
To dry up, become dry, or wither.
“drieth” in this verse is yavesh. This root names both the drying and the state of being dry. Its branches also name dry land, linking the river’s loss of water to the ground exposed when water recedes.
ALSO GROWS
yabbashah: Dry land or exposed ground.
יַבָּשָׁה
This noun names the landscape left when water is gone, the root’s end-state made visible.
yavesh: Dry or withered.
יָבֵשׁ
The same form describes the condition reached when the river’s water has disappeared.
THE PATTERN
Scripture uses dried waterways and withered growth to show that visible abundance can vanish.
He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground;For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat, but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways.THE THREAD
And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up.Isaiah uses the same יבש (y-b-sh) root and nearly the same sequence: waters fail, then the river dries. The shared root makes the river’s loss of water the visible mark of its end.
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