What Does Psalm 109:24 Mean in the King James?
My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness.
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 behind weak means to stumble: fasting here takes away the body’s footing while its flesh thins.
THE MEANING
When fasting depletes you, weakness reaches both support and substance: knees falter and flesh thins. The verse gives that bodily cost a physical voice.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the belief that fasting leaves the body untouched: the verse names unsteady knees and diminished flesh.
THE ROOT
כָּשְׁלוּ
kashlu
GROWS FROM
כשל
k-sh-l
To stumble, totter, or fail; to lose one’s footing.
The word translated weak paints the knees as stumbling, not merely low in energy. The verse pairs that loss of footing with flesh that has thinned, naming the body’s depletion in both support and substance.
ALSO GROWS
kashal: To stumble or totter.
כָּשַׁל
This verb makes the knees’ weakness a loss of steadiness.
mikhshol: A stumbling block or obstacle.
מִכְשׁוֹל
The related noun carries the same image of losing one’s footing.
שֶׁמֶן
shemen
GROWS FROM
שמן
sh-m-n
To be fat or rich; oil and fat as substance and fullness.
The word rendered fatness is shemen, also the word for oil. The flesh is pictured as losing its rich reserve, completing the image of a body depleted by fasting.
ALSO GROWS
shemen: Oil or fat.
שֶׁמֶן
The verse describes the flesh as growing lean away from this substance.
shamen: Fat, rich, or well-nourished.
שָׁמֵן
The related form names the fullness that the verse says the flesh has lost.
THE PATTERN
The cost of deprivation becomes visible in the body as hunger, withering, and lost strength.
My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.THE THREAD
For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.The same root כשל (k-sh-l, stumble or fail) describes strength that fails in this verse. Both passages give weakness a bodily shape, felt in knees and bones.
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