What Does Psalm 60:3 Mean in the King James?
Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.
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 turns hardship from something you are shown into a cup you are made to swallow, and names its effect as reeling, not mere surprise.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks from inside disorientation: the hard thing is shown to you, then made something you must swallow. It names God’s agency in that experience without softening its taste.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It overturns the assumption that divine agency is always experienced as immediate comfort: here God is named as the one who gives the people a disorienting cup.
THE ROOT
תַּרְעֵלָה
tar'elah
GROWS FROM
רעל
r-ʿ-l
To reel, totter, or stagger; the noun names a state of reeling.
“Astonishment” can sound like surprise, but תַּרְעֵלָה (tar’elah, reeling or staggering) names disorientation. Isaiah uses the same Hebrew noun for the “trembling” cup, giving this wine a bodily force.
ALSO GROWS
tar'elah: Reeling or staggering; rendered “astonishment” here and “trembling” in Isaiah 51:17, 22.
תַּרְעֵלָה
These renderings show that the word describes being destabilized, not simply feeling surprised.
yayin tar'elah: Wine of reeling or staggering.
יַיִן תַּרְעֵלָה
The phrase describes a drink whose effect is to unsettle the one who takes it in.
הִשְׁקִיתָנוּ
hišqîtānû
GROWS FROM
שקה
š-q-h
To drink, give drink, or water; in this form, to cause someone to drink.
“made us to drink” in this verse is hišqîtānû. The verb makes the people recipients of what God gives them: they do not only see hardship from a distance; they take it in. The same root can describe watering, the supplying of drink that enters and sustains.
ALSO GROWS
shaqah: To give drink or water.
שָׁקָה
The shared root makes the act of giving the cup explicit, whether the liquid sustains or disorients.
mashqeh: A drink or beverage; also a cupbearer, one who serves drink.
מַשְׁקֶה
This related word keeps the verse’s attention on what is served and received.
קָשָׁה
qashah
GROWS FROM
קשה
q-sh-h
To be hard, difficult, or severe; also to make hard.
“hard things” in this verse is qashah. The root can describe both hardship and the act of making something hard. The verse presents adversity as an experience God actively sets before the people.
ALSO GROWS
qasheh: Hard, difficult, or severe.
קָשֶׁה
This is the quality the verse gives to what the people are shown.
hiqshah: Made hard or hardened; a causative form of the same root.
הִקְשָׁה
The related form carries the root from a condition into an act that causes hardness.
THE PATTERN
Scripture repeatedly depicts judgment as a divinely assigned cup that its recipients must drink.
Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.For thus saith the LORD God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it.The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:THE THREAD
Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.Isaiah uses the same rare Hebrew noun תַּרְעֵלָה (tar’elah, reeling or staggering), rendered “trembling” in its cup image. That echo makes Psalm’s “astonishment” read as bodily disorientation under a cup given by God.
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