What Does Job 6:7 Mean in the King James?
The things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat.
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 Hebrew “soul” is the living, appetitive self, and its food is likened to sickness, so sorrow has reached the place where life receives nourishment.
THE MEANING
When the living self cannot receive what normally sustains it, sorrow reaches appetite itself. Here food is pictured with sickness, making nourishment hard to bear.
THE ROOT
נַפְשִׁי
nafshi
GROWS FROM
נפש
n-p-sh
to rest or refresh oneself
Nefesh means the living soul: the whole living self, including its appetite. When this self refuses food, the verse places sorrow in a person’s lived, bodily experience.
ALSO GROWS
naphash: to rest, be refreshed
נָפַשׁ
Exodus 23:12 uses this verb for rest and refreshment; the shared root places nefesh within a living creature’s capacity to be restored.
nephesh: living being, person, appetite
נֶפֶשׁ
This range lets “my soul refused” name the whole living self, including its appetite.
דְּוֵי
dəwê
GROWS FROM
דוה
d-w-h
to be sick, ill, or languish
The word rendered “sorrowful” comes from a sickness-root, giving the phrase a bodily edge: the food is like the sickness of his bread. Grief appears within nourishment itself, as what should sustain the living self becomes sickening.
ALSO GROWS
dāwāh: to be sick or languish
דָּוָה
Lamentations 5:17 uses this form for the heart’s sickness, showing how the root can express grief as illness.
dāweh: sick, ill
דָּוֶה
This related form names a sick or languishing state; in Job, that sickness shades the image of food itself.
THE PATTERN
Scripture ties appetite to the condition of the living self, showing that hunger, refusal, and even forgetting to eat belong to the whole person.
My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?THE THREAD
So that his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat.Job 33:20 places the same word, נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh; living soul), beside food the living self abhors. The shared root makes clear that “soul” here includes the appetite that turns away from nourishment.
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