What Does Job 5:4 Mean in the King James?
His children are far from safety, and they are crushed in the gate, neither is there any to deliver them.
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
What the English calls distance from “safety” is, at the root, distance from deliverance, the very rescue the verse then says is absent.
THE MEANING
The verse holds three realities together: the children are far from deliverance, crushed in the gate, and without any rescuer. It gives language to vulnerability exposed at a public threshold, where no one pulls the crushed free.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Being exposed where the community can see does not guarantee protection; this verse pictures children crushed in the gate with no one to rescue them.
THE ROOT
יֶשַׁע
yeshaʿ
GROWS FROM
י־ש־ע
y-sh-ʿ
Deliver, rescue, bring out of danger.
The word translated “safety” is yeshaʿ, from the root yashaʿ: deliverance, rescue, being brought out. The children are not merely far from a feeling of security; they are far from being brought out, in a verse that ends with no rescuer.
ALSO GROWS
yashaʿ: Deliver, rescue
יָשַׁע
This verb reveals the action carried within “safety”: deliverance is being brought out of danger.
yeshuʿah: Deliverance, rescue
יְשׁוּעָה
This noun names the rescue the children are far from.
moshiaʿ: Deliverer, rescuer
מוֹשִׁיעַ
The root can name the one who brings someone out, echoing the verse’s painful absence of anyone to rescue them.
מַצִּיל
matsil
GROWS FROM
נ־צ־ל
n-ts-l
Snatch away, rescue, extract from danger.
“deliver” in this verse is matsil. The final phrase names an agent: there is no matsil, no one to pull them clear. Hebrew’s rescue root can describe the act of extraction, but here the verse makes the absence of the rescuer itself part of the crushing.
ALSO GROWS
natsal: Snatch away, rescue
נָצַל
This verb carries the extraction that the children in the verse do not receive.
hitzil: He rescued
הִצִּיל
This form shows the same root as a completed act of rescue, the opposite of the absence named here.
THE PATTERN
The condition of the vulnerable at public thresholds reveals whether justice is actually protecting them.
For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.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
The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.“Delivereth” translates הִצִּילָם (hitzilam), from the same נצל root as matsil, the rescuer Job 5:4 says is absent. Here the cry is heard and rescue happens.
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