What Does Psalm 104:27 Mean?
All of them look to you, to give them their food in its time.
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
These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.THE KEY
The verse’s waiting is already a form of hope: every creature expects food that comes in its season.
THE MEANING
Your dependence belongs to this shared order: life looks toward a source beyond itself for food, and provision has its time. The verse presents waiting as an ordinary condition of living creatures, not evidence that life has been forgotten.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that needing sustenance means you are deficient: every living creature in the verse depends on provision.
THE ROOT
יְשַׂבֵּרוּ
yesabberu
GROWS FROM
שׂבר
śābar
To look for, expect, or hope; to wait expectantly.
“look to” in this verse is yesabberu. Here “wait” carries the sense of expectant hope: the creatures are oriented toward food that is given in its time. The same root appears where a speaker says “I have hoped,” exposing an expectation tucked inside the KJV’s “wait.”
ALSO GROWS
śēber: Hope or expectation.
שֶׂבֶר
This noun makes explicit the hope contained in the creatures’ waiting.
śibbartî: I hoped or waited expectantly (Psalm 119:166).
שִׂבַּרְתִּי
The first-person form shows that this root’s waiting carries an expectation of what is still to come.
לָתֵת
latet
GROWS FROM
נתן
natan
To give, put, or set.
The word for “give” comes from a root that also means to put or set. Provision is pictured as placed within the creatures’ lives at its fitting time, while the waiting root carries the expectation of receiving it.
ALSO GROWS
natan: To give, put, or set.
נָתַן
Its range lets giving include placing provision within reach.
mattanah: A gift or present.
מַתָּנָה
This branch echoes the verse’s image of food as something given to sustain life.
THE PATTERN
Living creatures are sustained through provision received in its fitting season.
The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in its season.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
For the grave cannot thank you, and death cannot praise you. Those who go down into the pit cannot watch for your truth.The phrase “cannot hope” uses the same Hebrew root שׂבר (śābar), meaning to expect or hope, that appears as “wait” here. This makes the creatures’ waiting a form of living expectation, directed toward the food given in its season.
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