What Does Psalm 104:13 Mean?
He gives drink to the mountains from his upper rooms; the earth is filled with the fruit of your works.
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
He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.THE KEY
The earth’s fullness arrives as water descends and becomes fruit through God’s work.
THE MEANING
The hills are watered from God’s chambers, and the earth is filled by the fruit of that work. Giving and receiving meet here: what reaches the ground becomes fruit, and fruit becomes the earth’s fullness.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse dissolves the idea that the earth’s abundance is self-generated; it traces the fruit to provision flowing from God’s chambers.
THE ROOT
תִּשְׂבַּע
tisbaʿ
GROWS FROM
שׂבע
ś-b-ʿ
To be sated or filled; to reach fullness.
The verb comes from שׂבע (ś-b-ʿ, to be sated or filled), the same root behind the word for a full person and the word for satiety. The earth does not merely produce; it reaches fullness through the fruit of God’s work.
ALSO GROWS
śāvēaʿ: Full, sated
שָׂבֵעַ
This adjective describes the state the earth reaches: filled rather than merely supplied.
śōvaʿ: Satiety, abundance
שֹׂבַע
This noun makes the verse’s result explicit: the earth receives enough to be full.
מַשְׁקֶה
mashqeh
GROWS FROM
שקה
To drink or give drink; to water.
“gives drink” in this verse is mashqeh. The verb is a form of שקה (sh-q-h, to drink or give drink): God makes the hills drink. Watering is shown as provision received by the land, the beginning of the fruit that satisfies it.
ALSO GROWS
shāqāh: To drink or give drink
שָׁקָה
The verb names the same act of drinking that the watering causes in the hills.
mashqeh: Drink or beverage; one who gives drink
מַשְׁקֶה
This form can name both what is given to drink and the one who supplies it, holding provision and its source together.
THE PATTERN
Provision flowing from above reaches the earth and nourishes living things into fullness.
You visit the earth and give it drink; you enrich it greatly. The channels of God are full of waters. You set their grain firm, for so you have set it.So that you may become children of your Father in the heavens, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the aligned and on the crooked.Yet he did not leave himself without witness, doing good, giving you rain from heaven and seasons that bear fruit, filling your hearts with food and gladness.THE THREAD
You open your hand and fill every living thing with delight.Both verses use שׂבע (ś-b-ʿ, to be sated or filled): here the earth is satisfied, and there every living thing is satisfied as God’s hand opens. The first shows fullness arriving as fruit; the second reveals that this fullness extends to every living thing.
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