What Does Psalm 107:33 Mean?
He turns rivers into a wilderness, and the outgoings of waters into a thirsting ground.
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 turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground;THE KEY
The “dry ground” is a place of thirst, so the verse pictures the very sources of water becoming lack.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks now of how the channels that sustain life can become wasteland and thirst. God is the acting subject: even the sources of life can be changed into desolation.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that the sources sustaining life are beyond God’s power to change.
THE ROOT
צִמָּאוֹן
tzimmaon
GROWS FROM
צמא
to thirst
“thirsting ground” in this verse is tzimmaon. The word translated “dry ground” means a place of thirst or drought, from צמא (tsama), “to thirst.” The image is more than bare terrain: the land itself is rendered as thirst.
ALSO GROWS
tsame: thirsty
צָמֵא
The same root describes the condition of thirst that characterizes the ground.
tsama: to thirst
צָמָא
This verbal form makes thirst an active condition, not merely an absence of water.
tzimmaon: thirsty place; drought
צִמָּאוֹן
This is the word used for the ground in the verse, making the landscape itself embody thirst.
מֹצָאֵי מַיִם
motsa’ei mayim
GROWS FROM
יצא
to go out, emerge
“outgoings of waters” in this verse is motsa’ei mayim. The phrase means “outlets of waters”: the source is named by the water that goes out from it. Set beside צִמָּאוֹן (tzimmaon), “thirsty place,” the line turns emergence into lack.
ALSO GROWS
yatsa: to go out, emerge
יָצָא
This verb carries the motion contained in the name for the water’s outlet.
motsa: outlet, source, exit
מוֹצָא
This form names a place of emergence, clarifying what the verse calls watersprings.
totza’ah: outcome, result
תּוֹצָאָה
The same root connects what comes out with the result that follows.
THE PATTERN
In God’s hands, barrenness and abundance are reversible conditions.
He turns the wilderness into a pool of waters, and the thirsting ground into outgoings of waters.I will open rivers on the bare heights, and eyes of waters in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of waters, and the parched land springs of waters.But whoever drinks of the water I give never thirsts into the ages; the water I give becomes in him a spring of water leaping up into the life of the ages.THE THREAD
He turns the wilderness into a pool of waters, and the thirsting ground into outgoings of waters.The same psalm turns the image in verse 33 around: wilderness becomes standing water, and dry ground becomes springs. Read together, the verses show both desolation and abundance as conditions that can be reversed.
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