What Does Psalm 53:4 Mean in the King James?
Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread: they have not called upon God.
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’s sharpest charge is that people have become bread: their attackers consume them as casually as a meal.
THE MEANING
This verse names the way exploitation becomes ordinary: people are consumed as casually as food. Its question about knowledge presses on perception itself, the people being consumed are God’s people, yet their attackers neither recognize them nor call on God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that consuming people is simply how the world works, or that such violence can be separated from one’s relation to God.
THE ROOT
אֹכְלֵי
okhlei
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
eat, consume
“eat up” in this verse is okhlei. The Hebrew uses the same root for those who are eaters of the people and for how they eat bread. The ordinary act of eating becomes the measure of their violence: people are treated as consumable.
ALSO GROWS
ʾākhal: eat, consume
אָכַל
This verb is repeated in the verse for eating bread, placing the attackers’ treatment of people beside an ordinary meal.
maʾakhal: food, something eaten
מַאֲכָל
This word from the same root names what is consumed, sharpening the verse’s image of people reduced to provisions.
יָדְעוּ
yadʿu
GROWS FROM
ידע
y-d-ʿ
know, perceive, recognize
“knowledge” in this verse is yadʿu. The question uses yada, knowing that includes perception and recognition. The charge reaches beyond a lack of information: the attackers fail to recognize the people before them, and they do not call on God.
ALSO GROWS
daʿat: knowledge, perception
דַּעַת
This noun from the same root shows that the verse’s question concerns what is truly perceived, not merely what is known as a fact.
maddaʿ: knowledge, understanding
מַדָּע
This branch reinforces the link between knowing and understanding that the attackers’ actions deny.
THE PATTERN
Predatory power treats people as food instead of preserving their life.
Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock.The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.THE THREAD
Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.Micah uses the same Hebrew root, אכל (ʾ-k-l), meaning eat or consume, and makes the image bodily: the people are stripped and broken into pieces. It opens the Psalm’s comparison with bread onto the violence hidden in treating people as food.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us