What Does Job 30:3 Mean in the King James?
For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste.
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 closing “desolate and waste” repeats one Hebrew root in two forms, making deprivation echo through the scene.
THE MEANING
When want and hunger press on you, isolation can feel as wide as the landscape: dry, emptied, desolate. The verse lets deprivation register in the body and the world around it without dressing it up as virtue.
THE ROOT
שׁוֹאָה וּמְשׁוֹאָה
sho'ah u-mesho'ah
GROWS FROM
שׁ־א־ה
sh-ʾ-h
To be desolated or laid waste; ruin, devastation.
“desolate and waste” in this verse is sho'ah u-mesho'ah. Hebrew ends with שׁוֹאָה (sho’ah, desolation) and מְשׁוֹאָה (mesho’ah, waste), two forms from שׁאה (sha’ah, to be laid waste). Their shared root makes desolation echo through the scene.
ALSO GROWS
sho'ah: Desolation, ruin.
שׁוֹאָה
This is the first form in the closing pair, naming the devastated condition.
mesho'ah: Waste, devastation.
מְשׁוֹאָה
This related form repeats the same root, binding “waste” to the preceding desolation.
חֶסֶר
cheser
GROWS FROM
ח־ס־ר
ḥ-s-r
To lack, be deficient, or fall short.
The verse’s “want” is חֶסֶר (cheser, lack), from a root that also forms חָסֵר (chaser, to be lacking) and מַחְסוֹר (machsor, need or scarcity). Alongside hunger, solitary flight, and devastation, that root lets lack spread through the whole scene.
ALSO GROWS
chaser: To lack, be short of something.
חָסֵר
This verbal form shows the condition behind “want”: something needed is missing.
machsor: Need, want, scarcity.
מַחְסוֹר
This noun names the condition created by lack, linking the verse’s word to a broader family of deprivation.
THE PATTERN
Severe need can spread from lost provision into bodily depletion and isolation.
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.THE THREAD
A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.The “want” in Job 30:3 and Psalm 23:1 share חֶסֶר (cheser, lack). Job shows lack as hunger and isolation; Psalm 23:1 places the same root in “I shall not want,” setting those experiences beside one another.
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