What Does Job 41:4 Mean in the King James?
Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
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
A covenant cannot make the untamable your possession.
THE MEANING
The question places you before the limits of human mastery: can this creature enter terms with you, or become your servant for the age? It exposes the distance between wanting to possess what is powerful and being able to command it for the long term.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that an agreement or claim of ownership can guarantee lasting control.
THE ROOT
יִכְרֹת בְּרִית
yikrot berit
GROWS FROM
כרת
karat
Cut, sever.
“make a covenant” in this verse is yikrot berit. The Hebrew idiom is literally “cut a covenant,” joining agreement with the image of a cut that binds. The question asks whether human terms can bind Leviathan and place it under lasting command.
ALSO GROWS
karat berit: Cut a covenant; establish an agreement.
כָּרַת בְּרִית
This is the verse’s own phrase: the bond is pictured through the act of cutting.
yikkaret: Be cut off, severed.
יִכָּרֵת
This form carries the root’s sense of separation, showing that the seed behind covenant language also holds the force of cutting apart.
עֶבֶד
eved
GROWS FROM
עבד
avad
Work, serve.
“servant” in this verse is eved. Eved names a person in a relation of service and labor. Beside “take,” it pictures ongoing work under another’s command, the human arrangement the verse questions.
ALSO GROWS
avad: Work, serve.
עָבַד
The verb reveals the activity held within the noun servant: labor in service to another.
avodah: Work, service, labor.
עֲבֹדָה
This related noun makes the continuing labor implied by taking someone as a servant visible.
THE PATTERN
Wild forces that exceed human command remain within God’s creative ordering.
Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?THE THREAD
In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:The Hebrew verb for “made” here is כָּרַת (karat, “cut”), the same root behind Job’s “make a covenant.” Genesis shows the LORD establishing a covenant; Job’s question presses whether a human can bind Leviathan by such terms.
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