What Does Psalm 107:13 Mean?
Then they cry out to the LORD in their narrowness, and he brings them out of their narrow places.
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
Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses.THE KEY
The verse places a cry inside narrowness and answers it with deliverance out of the pressure.
THE MEANING
When trouble narrows your way, your cry reaches the LORD from inside it. Deliverance meets you there and brings you out from what presses you in.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that distress means you are abandoned and must find your own way out.
THE ROOT
בַּצַּר
batsar
GROWS FROM
צרר
To bind, confine, or press in; צַר (tsar) means narrow.
“narrowness” in this verse is batsar. The word translated “trouble” carries the sense of being hemmed into a narrow place. The verse’s distress is not only a feeling; it is pressure around a life, and the cry rises from within that pressure.
ALSO GROWS
tsarah: Distress, adversity.
צָרָה
This branch shows trouble as a constricting condition, echoing the narrowness named in the verse.
metsar: A narrow place, a strait.
מֵצַר
Psalm 118:5 uses this word for distress and places it beside a “large place,” making the movement out of narrowness visible.
יוֹשִׁיעֵם
yoshi’em
GROWS FROM
ישע
To deliver, rescue, and bring into safety.
“brings them out” in this verse is yoshi’em. The verb names deliverance from what holds a person in danger. Its word-family includes both the plea for deliverance and deliverance itself, joining the cry and its answer in a shared root.
ALSO GROWS
yeshuah: Deliverance.
יְשׁוּעָה
The noun names what the LORD brings about in this verse: deliverance from what presses in.
hoshi’a: Deliver! A plea for rescue.
הוֹשִׁיעָה
This form appears in the plea “Hosanna”; the word-family of the answer also gives voice to a cry for help.
Yeshua: A name formed from the root of deliverance.
יֵשׁוּעַ
The name carries the nature of the root: deliverance is not merely an event but a character expressed through the name.
THE PATTERN
A cry from a constricted place is met with deliverance.
The aligned cry out, and the LORD hears, and snatches them out of all their narrow places.And it will be for a sign and for a witness to the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt, for they will cry out to the LORD because of those who press them, and he will send them a deliverer and a great one, and he will snatch them out.For everyone who calls upon the nature of the LORD will be delivered.THE THREAD
From the narrow place I call out to the LORD, and the LORD answers me in a wide place.The word translated “trouble” here comes from tsar, “narrow”; Psalm 118:5 uses the related word metsar for a narrow place. There the answer opens into a “large place,” revealing the movement from constriction to spaciousness.
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