What Does Job 20:19 Mean in the King James?
Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not;
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 joins a seized house to the crushing and abandonment of the poor, so the possession itself bears the trace of their dispossession.
THE MEANING
This verse names a pattern that can still take shape now: someone crushes people already made vulnerable, abandons them, and takes a home they did not build. The house stands as visible gain, while its foundation is another person’s dispossession.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that holding what you seize makes it rightfully yours: the house remains bound to the people crushed and abandoned for it.
THE ROOT
רָצַץ
ratsats
GROWS FROM
רצץ
r-ts-ts
to crush, break, or press down
The verb translated “oppressed” belongs to the same root as the word for a “bruised” or crushed reed. Hebrew holds social oppression and physical breaking in one word-family: the powerful person acts by crushing.
ALSO GROWS
ratsats: to crush or oppress
רָצַץ
This is the verb used here: what English renders as oppression carries the force of crushing.
rātsûts: crushed or bruised, as in the bruised reed of Isaiah 42:3
רָצוּץ
The same root describes a thing already bent and broken, sharpening the violence in the treatment of the poor.
דַלִּים
dallim
GROWS FROM
דלל
d-l-l
to be low, weak, or diminished
The word for the poor belongs to a root of being low or diminished. The verse places the crushing of people already described as low alongside the taking of a house.
ALSO GROWS
dal: low, weak, or poor
דַּל
This singular form names the same condition that appears in Job’s plural “poor.”
wayyiddal: he or it was brought low; diminished
וַיִּדַּל
This verb form shows the root’s movement toward being made low, echoing the vulnerability named here.
יִבְנֵהוּ
yivnehuhu
GROWS FROM
בנה
b-n-h
to build or establish
“builded” in this verse is yivnehuhu. The root names the work that establishes a house; its branches name the builder and the building. By saying the taker did not build what he seized, the verse makes the missing labor part of the charge.
ALSO GROWS
boneh: one who builds, a builder
בּוֹנֶה
The builder is explicitly absent from the taking described in the verse.
binyan: a building or structure
בִּנְיָן
This noun from the same root makes the contrast concrete: the structure remains, though the one who took it did not build it.
THE PATTERN
Violence against the vulnerable is exposed by the property it transfers to the powerful.
And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate:Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate:Job calls the poor דַלִּים (dallim, the poor or low); Proverbs uses דַּל (dal, poor), from the same root. That shared word ties both passages’ warning to the person made vulnerable, not just to the property taken.
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