What Does Psalm 104:26 Mean?
There the ships go, and this leviathan you shape to laugh in it.
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
There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.THE KEY
Leviathan’s vastness belongs to play: the sea creature is God’s making, moving in its own element.
THE MEANING
Ships cross the sea while Leviathan moves there too, made to play in its waters. Its immense life belongs within God’s creation, beyond the measure of human use or control.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
What is vast and untamable is not outside God’s making; here Leviathan is a creature made to play in the sea.
THE ROOT
לְשַׂחֶק
lesacheq
GROWS FROM
שׂחק
to laugh, play, or sport
“laugh” in this verse is lesacheq. The root carries both play and laughter, so “play” holds a note of delight as well as movement. Leviathan’s power is presented as a form of life within God’s sea, not as an interruption to it.
ALSO GROWS
mesacheqeth: playing, rejoicing
מְשַׂחֶקֶת
In Proverbs 8:30, Wisdom is described with this same root as “rejoicing” before God; the shared word links the sea’s play with delight in creation.
sechoq: laughter
שְׂחוֹק
Ecclesiastes 2:2 uses this noun for laughter, showing that the root’s language of play also carries the sound of delight.
THE PATTERN
Creatures beyond human command remain God’s handiwork and within God’s care.
And God created the great sea serpents, and every living soul that creeps, which the waters swarmed with after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good.Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook, or sink his tongue with a cord?Look at the birds of the air, for they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather into storehouses; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?THE THREAD
Then I am at his side, a craftsman; and I am his delight day by day, laughing before him at all times.The Hebrew verb translated “rejoicing,” מְשַׂחֶקֶת (mesacheqeth), comes from the same root שׂחק (śaḥaq), meaning “play” or “laugh,” as the word rendered “play” here. In both verses, play belongs within God’s created world, opening this sea scene onto a wider image of delight.
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