What Does Psalm 109:9 Mean?
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
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 children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.THE KEY
The curse extends one man’s destruction into two broken bonds: children without a father and a wife without her husband.
THE MEANING
The verse gives the curse its full reach: a man’s death leaves his children fatherless and his wife widowed. The harm does not end with its target; it names the family members who carry the loss.
THE ROOT
יְתוֹמִים
yĕtômîm
GROWS FROM
יתם
y-t-m
to be orphaned, bereft of a father
The Hebrew word names the children as orphans, giving their loss a recognized status rather than merely describing an absent parent. The same term appears where scripture names the fatherless among those owed care, so the curse reaches people already made vulnerable by the household rupture.
ALSO GROWS
yātôm: an orphan
יָתוֹם
The singular names the condition the verse places on his children together.
yĕtômîm: orphans, fatherless children
יְתוֹמִים
This plural form makes the imposed loss belong to the children as a group.
THE PATTERN
Fatherlessness and widowhood mark the exposed edge of household rupture, recurring in scripture as a measure of justice and care.
You shall not press on any widow or fatherless child.He executes judgment for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him bread and a cloak.Clean and unstained service before God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widowed in their being pressed, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.THE THREAD
A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his set-apart dwelling.Psalm 109:9 names fatherlessness and widowhood as the curse’s outcome; Psalm 68:5 repeats both conditions and places them within God’s care. The shared terms make the damage here visible against scripture’s recurring attention to the people left exposed.
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