What Does Psalm 109:13 Mean?
Let what comes after him be cut off, and in a generation let their name be wiped away.
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
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.THE KEY
The curse reaches past a person’s death: it attacks both the future and the name that carries their nature forward.
THE MEANING
The verse gives you the image of a curse aimed at more than one life: it cuts away a future line and erases the nature carried in a name from the next generation. Its violence is explicit, both posterity and remembrance are targeted.
THE ROOT
אַחֲרִיתוֹ
acharitô
GROWS FROM
אחר
After, behind; what comes later.
“what comes after him” in this verse is acharitô. The word translated “posterity” carries the sense of what comes after: the future, the latter end. Paired with “the generation following,” it makes the target of the curse unmistakable, the continuation of his line.
ALSO GROWS
achar: After, behind.
אַחַר
This is the seed of the word for posterity: what comes later.
acharit: Latter end, future, posterity.
אַחֲרִית
This is the word in the verse; it points to the life and line still to come.
acharon: Last, latter.
אַחֲרוֹן
This branch keeps the root’s sense of what follows or comes last.
שְׁמָם
shemam
GROWS FROM
שם
Name; identity and reputation carried in memory.
Here, “name” is more than a label: it is the nature and story that can continue through those who remember it. To erase the name is to erase that continuing presence.
ALSO GROWS
shem tov: A good name; a good reputation.
שֵׁם טוֹב
A name carries the character by which a person is remembered.
shem olam: An enduring name.
שֵׁם עוֹלָם
This phrase shows a name continuing beyond one generation, the very continuity this curse targets.
יִמַּח
yimmaḥ
GROWS FROM
מחה
Wipe away, erase, blot out.
“wiped away” in this verse is yimmaḥ. The verb pictures active removal, sharper than a name merely fading from memory. The verse imagines the next generation as carrying no trace of that name.
ALSO GROWS
emḥeh: I will wipe out.
אֶמְחֶה
The same root appears in Genesis 6:7, where what is on the earth is to be wiped away.
vayyimmaḥ: And he wiped out.
וַיִּמַח
This form in Genesis 7:23 uses the same root for wiping away what had been on the ground.
THE PATTERN
A name is a continuing presence that scripture depicts as either erased from memory or preserved beyond a generation.
And it shall be, when the LORD your God gives you rest from all your enemies around you, in the land which the LORD your God gives you as an inheritance to take hold of, that you shall wipe out the remembrance of Amalek from under the heavens; you shall not forget.Even to them will I set in my house, and within my walls, a hand and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give them a name of the ages that shall not be cut off.The one who overcomes will be wrapped in white. I will never wipe his name from the scroll of life, but I will speak his name in agreement before the face of my Father, and before the face of his messengers.THE THREAD
And the LORD said to Moses, Whoever has missed against me, him will I wipe out of my scroll.The Hebrew verb behind “blotted out” is מָחָה (machah), meaning to wipe away or erase; Exodus uses the same root for being blotted out of a book. Here, that erasure reaches the name carried into the next generation.
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