What Does Lamentations 3:23 Mean?
They are new every morning; great is your steadiness.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.THE KEY
What is new each morning is held inside what has never wavered.
THE MEANING
Mercies meet you new each morning, and God’s trustworthiness is abundant beneath that renewal. Today’s freshness rests on a reliability that does not have to be remade.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that yesterday’s failure or depletion determines what can meet you today.
THE ROOT
אֱמוּנָתֶךָ
ʾĕmûnāteḵā
GROWS FROM
אמן
Firm, steady, reliable; אמן is transliterated ʾ-m-n (ʾāman).
The verse’s faithfulness carries the sense of what is firm enough to be trusted and leaned on. Its root holds trust and steadiness together: the morning’s renewal rests on what remains dependable.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāmēn: Truly; firm, or so be it.
אָמֵן
The same root turns steadiness into an affirmation: what is reliable can be affirmed as true.
neʾĕmān: Reliable, trustworthy.
נֶאֱמָן
This form describes someone as dependable, showing the quality beneath the verse’s abundant faithfulness.
heʾĕmîn: To trust, to believe.
הֶאֱמִין
Trust is the response to what is firm; the verse presents God’s reliability as something a person can lean on.
חֲדָשִׁים
ḥădāshîm
GROWS FROM
חדש
To be new or renew; חָדָשׁ is transliterated ḥādāsh.
The plural form means new things or renewals, giving the morning’s freshness a repeated, arriving quality. The same root gives the word for a month, חֹדֶשׁ (ḥōdesh), linked to the new moon and the return of a cycle.
ALSO GROWS
ḥiddēsh: Renewed, made new.
חִדֵּשׁ
This verb makes the renewal active: what is new in the verse is continually made fresh.
ḥōdesh: Month; new moon.
חֹדֶשׁ
The word’s link with the returning new moon echoes the verse’s recurring arrival of newness.
THE PATTERN
Renewal arrives day by day because what sustains it outlasts the night.
For the burning of his anger lasts a moment, and in his favor is life. Weeping may lodge in the evening, but a ringing cry of joy comes in the morning.And they gathered it every morning, each one according to his eating, and when the sun grew hot, it melted.Therefore we do not give out; though our outer person is worn through, yet our inner person is made new day after day.THE THREAD
Behold, his living soul is swollen, and it is not straight within him, but the aligned one shall live by the lean of his full weight.The Hebrew word behind “faith” is אֱמוּנָתוֹ (ʾĕmûnātô, his faith or trust), from the same root אמן (ʾ-m-n, firm and reliable) as the faithfulness in Lamentations. The shared root connects living by trust with the steady ground that makes trust possible.
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