What Does Job 31:3 Mean in the King James?
Is not destruction to the wicked? and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?
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 presents destruction as the harvest of injustice already being worked, not an unrelated event.
THE MEANING
Right now, the verse names destruction as the consequence attached to injustice, and calls that consequence strange, an alien thing. It gives wrongdoing the shape of work: something actively done, with an outcome.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that injustice can be practiced as harmless work, with its consequences kept separate from the worker.
THE ROOT
פֹּעֲלֵי
poʿalei
GROWS FROM
פעל
To do, make, or work.
The verse calls these people workers of iniquity, giving wrongdoing the shape of something actively made. The root keeps attention on the work being done and its outcome, not only on a label attached to a person.
ALSO GROWS
poʿel: One who works or acts.
פֹּעֵל
The same root names the person by the activity, making the verse’s focus on what is done concrete.
peʿullah: Work, a deed, or its pay.
פְּעֻלָּה
This branch can name both the work and what it yields, echoing the verse’s pairing of workers with destruction.
נֵכֶר
neker
GROWS FROM
נכר
To recognize or regard as foreign; foreignness or strangeness.
The word translated “strange” carries the sense of something foreign or alien. The consequence is presented as more than ordinary trouble: it is an outcome marked as strange.
ALSO GROWS
nokri: Someone regarded as foreign or outside one’s own group.
נָכְרִי
This branch makes the word’s alien quality vivid: the punishment is described as strange, something foreign.
hikkir: To recognize or distinguish.
הִכִּיר
This branch links foreignness with recognition: something is marked as strange when it is distinguished as other.
THE PATTERN
The fruit of a path follows the work planted along it, even when the consequence is not immediate.
He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity: and the rod of his anger shall fail.For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.THE THREAD
When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever:Psalm 92:7 repeats the Hebrew phrase פֹּעֲלֵי אָוֶן (poʿalei aven, “workers of iniquity”). It holds apparent flourishing and destruction together, opening Job’s claim as a pattern in which the work and its outcome may not appear at the same time.
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