What Does Job 6:2 Mean in the King James?
Oh that my grief were throughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!
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 puts grief on a scale, insisting that what is invisible still has weight.
THE MEANING
Grief here is a burden whose full measure has not yet been seen. The verse places inward pain and outward calamity on the same scales, where neither can be minimized by weighing it alone.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that suffering is exaggerated or weightless because its full measure cannot be seen from the outside.
THE ROOT
יִשָּׁקֵל
yishaqel
GROWS FROM
שקל
To weigh; to measure by weight.
The verb comes from the same root as the shekel, a unit of weight, and mishqal, meaning weight or measure by weight. Job frames grief as something real enough to register on a scale, then asks that grief and calamity be weighed together.
ALSO GROWS
sheqel: A shekel, a unit of weight.
שֶׁקֶל
The same root gives the name of a weight-unit, grounding Job’s plea in material measurement.
mishqal: Weight; a measure by weight.
מִשְׁקָל
This branch makes explicit the measure Job wants applied to his combined grief and calamity.
כַּעְשִׂי
kaʿasi
GROWS FROM
כעס
To be vexed or provoked; vexation, anger, or grief.
The word for grief carries the root’s sense of vexation: distress that troubles and stirs a person. Its pairing with calamity gives the scale both an inward anguish and an outward blow.
ALSO GROWS
kaʿas: Vexation, anger, or grief.
כַּעַס
This noun shares the root of Job’s grief and keeps its troubled, stirred quality visible.
hikʿis: To provoke or anger.
הִכְעִיס
This verbal branch shows the root also names what stirs vexation, adding the sense of distress that has been aggravated.
THE PATTERN
Weighing makes hidden realities legible by giving them their true measure.
Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity.All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD weigheth the spirits.For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;THE THREAD
Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?Isaiah’s verb יִשְׁקֹל (yishqol, weighs) comes from the same root שקל (shaqal, to weigh) as Job’s plea. Here the same weighing language holds mountains and hills, placing Job’s inward calamity within a vocabulary capacious enough to measure the immense.
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