What Does Psalm 10:13 Mean?
Why does the wicked spurn God? He says in his heart, You will not seek it out.
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
Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it.THE KEY
The heart’s contempt rests on the assumption that God will never come seeking what it has hidden.
THE MEANING
Contempt here begins with the claim that God will not seek the matter out. The verse brings that claim into the open: what feels unaccounted for remains within the reach of divine inquiry.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that what goes unseen can never be called to account.
THE ROOT
תִדְרֹשׁ
tidrosh
GROWS FROM
דרש
To seek, inquire into, investigate, or demand.
“You will not seek it out” in this verse is tidrosh. The word translated “require” carries the sense of seeking the matter out. The heart claims God will not pursue or inquire into what has happened.
ALSO GROWS
midrash: Inquiry or exposition
מִדְרָשׁ
This branch names a searching that draws out what is present, echoing the verse’s idea of seeking a matter out.
derishah: Inquiry or demand
דְּרִישָׁה
The same root can name a claim pursued, the very pursuit the heart assumes will not come.
נָאַץ
na'ats
GROWS FROM
נאץ
To spurn, despise, or treat with contempt.
“Why does the wicked spurn God” in this verse is na'ats. Contempt is more than an inward opinion here: it takes shape as a claim about what God will not do. The verse links despising God to treating divine inquiry as something that will never reach this matter.
ALSO GROWS
ni'atsu: They spurned or provoked
נִאֲצוּ
This form shows contempt as an active rejection, fitting the verse’s portrayal of contempt expressed through a confident claim.
ni'uts: Blasphemy or contemptuous speech
נִיאוּץ
The root can also describe contempt voiced against God; here the voice of contempt appears as the heart’s assertion that God will not seek the matter.
THE PATTERN
The claim that wrongdoing stays unaccounted for depends on believing no one will search it out.
And the LORD said, What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.For God brings every making into judgment, upon every hidden thing, whether good or harm.And no creation is hidden before him, but all things are naked and bared at the throat to the eyes of him to whom our account belongs.THE THREAD
For he who seeks out blood remembers them; he does not forget the cry of the bowed ones.“Inquisition” translates the same Hebrew root, דרש (darash), as “require” in Psalm 10:13. One verse names the claim that God will not seek; the other uses that same root for God’s seeking of the bloodshed and the cry connected to it.
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