What Does Job 31:18 Mean in the King James?
(For from my youth he was brought up with me, as with a father, and I have guided her from my mother’s womb;)
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 vulnerable are woven into a life of care from its beginning, not treated as a brief obligation.
THE MEANING
The fatherless grows up beside the speaker as with a father, while the speaker’s guidance of her reaches back to the beginning of his own life. Care here takes the shape of kinship, spanning a lifetime.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that a child without a father must grow up outside the shelter of family is undone: the verse places him within the speaker’s life, “as with a father.”
THE ROOT
גִּדְּלָנִי
giddəlānî
GROWS FROM
גָּדַל
To grow or become great; in a causative form, to raise or bring up.
The root beneath “brought up” carries the sense of growth and becoming great. English can make the phrase sound like a completed act, while the root lets us see a life growing within a father-like bond.
ALSO GROWS
gādōl: Great, large
גָּדוֹל
This branch shares the root’s language of becoming great, deepening “brought up” into an image of life growing toward fullness.
migdal: Tower
מִגְדָּל
A tower is something raised high; this branch shows the root’s movement from growth to elevation.
THE PATTERN
Scripture draws the fatherless and widow into care through fatherly regard and attentive presence.
A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.THE THREAD
And the child Samuel grew on, and was in favour both with the LORD, and also with men.The word translated “brought up” and Samuel’s “grew” share the Hebrew root גדל (g-d-l), carrying the sense of growing or becoming great. That shared seed makes Job’s image vivid: a vulnerable person’s life grows within someone’s care.
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