What Does Psalm 107:6 Mean in the King James?
Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses.
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 repeats the image of narrowness, then makes deliverance the act of being pulled out.
THE MEANING
Your cry reaches the LORD while you are in the tight place, and the verse names an answer that pulls you out of its hold. The pressure is real, but it is not the whole shape of your life; there is a way from enclosure toward room.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that distress traps you beyond reach dissolves: the narrow place does not get the final word.
THE ROOT
בַּצַּר
ba-tsar
GROWS FROM
צ־ר־ר
ts-r-r
To bind, press in, or make narrow.
The Hebrew gives trouble a spatial image: being pressed into a narrow place. Its sound echoes מִצְרַיִם (Mitzrayim, Egypt, the two narrows), joining this distress to the Bible’s larger movement from constriction toward spaciousness.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow, tight; a strait.
צַר
This branch makes the pressure in “trouble” feel like a narrowed space rather than a vague difficulty.
tsarah: Distress, trouble, or a strait.
צָרָה
It carries the same image of being hemmed in that the verse repeats in “their distresses.”
יַצִּילֵם
yatsilem
GROWS FROM
נ־צ־ל
natsal
To pull away, rescue, or snatch free.
“delivered” in this verse is yatsilem. נצל (natsal) pictures removal from what holds a person. Its branch for stripping or plundering makes the rescue sharply subtractive: what can be taken away from a hold is taken away, opening a way out.
ALSO GROWS
nitsal: Be rescued or escape.
נִצַּל
The passive form shows the person’s changed position: no longer held, but free of the danger.
venitzaltem: You shall plunder or strip away.
וְנִצַּלְתֶּם
In another form, the root describes taking things away from an oppressor, echoing the removal at the heart of deliverance.
THE PATTERN
A cry from a place of pressure meets an answer that brings the person out.
The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt: for they shall cry unto the LORD because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them.Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us;THE THREAD
And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.Exodus 3:8 uses נצל (natsal, rescue or pull away), the same root translated “delivered” here. It then names the direction of rescue as a “good land and a large”: being drawn out of constriction opens toward spaciousness.
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