What Does Psalm 106:20 Mean in the King James?
Thus they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass.
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
They exchange what carries weight for the likeness of a creature whose life depends on eating grass.
THE MEANING
The verse exposes a trade: the one who is their weight becomes, in their sight, the likeness of an ox feeding on grass. The creature in the image depends on what it consumes, while the living weight cannot be contained in a shape. The same exchange is present whenever living reality is reduced to an image small enough to manage.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A visible, manageable image can never contain the full weight of the living reality it replaces.
THE ROOT
כָּבוֹד
kavod
GROWS FROM
כבד
K-B-D
To be heavy; to carry weight.
Here, glory carries the sense of weight: the reality that gives them significance. The shock is that this weight is exchanged for a formed likeness of an ox, a creature sustained by grass.
ALSO GROWS
kāvēḏ: Heavy.
כָּבֵד
This adjective preserves the root’s concrete sense of weight beneath the verse’s language of glory.
kibbēd: To honor; to treat as weighty.
כִּבֵּד
The branch shows that honor is a way of assigning weight, which makes the exchange in this verse a loss of what is treated as weighty.
THE PATTERN
When people exchange living weight for a manageable likeness, the image shrinks the reality it claims to hold.
And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.THE THREAD
And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.Romans names the traded reality with δόξα (doxa, weight), matching this verse’s כָּבוֹד (kavod, weight), then describes the same exchange into creature-images. Across Hebrew and Greek, the architecture is the same: living weight is reduced to a likeness.
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