What Does Psalm 110:5 Mean?
The Lord at your right hand shatters kings in the day of the burning of his anger.
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
The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath.THE KEY
The verse makes wrath a burning nostril and gives that anger a political target: kings are struck through.
THE MEANING
The Lord is at your right hand, and no king stands beyond the reach of his judgment. When the day of his anger comes, the verse says plainly that kings are struck through.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that rulers are beyond judgment falls away here: no crown places a king beyond the reach of divine force.
THE ROOT
אַפּוֹ
appo from af
GROWS FROM
אנף
ʾ-n-p
To flare in anger, pictured through the nose or nostrils.
“the burning of his anger” in this verse is appo from af. The KJV’s “wrath” names the anger, while the Hebrew word carries the concrete image of the burning nostril. Here that anger has a day and an object: kings are struck through.
ALSO GROWS
af: Nose or nostril; also anger or wrath.
אַף
This branch keeps the verse’s anger connected to a bodily image.
anaph: To be angry, to flare with anger.
אָנַף
This verb shows that the word for wrath belongs to a family that pictures anger as flaring.
appayim: Nostrils; used in expressions for anger, as in erekh appayim, slow to flare.
אַפַּיִם
This form preserves the nostril image within expressions about anger.
מְלָכִים
melakhim
GROWS FROM
מלך
m-l-k
To rule or reign; to exercise kingship.
Kings, reigning, and kingdom share one root: the office, its action, and its dominion belong to the same word family. The verse’s force falls on those who embody that visible sovereignty.
ALSO GROWS
melekh: A king; one who rules.
מֶלֶךְ
This singular form shows that the verse’s kings belong to a shared root of rule.
malakh: To reign or rule.
מָלַךְ
This verb makes explicit the action carried within the word for kings.
malkhut: Kingdom, kingship, or royal dominion.
מַלְכוּת
This branch extends the same root from the ruler to the dominion he holds.
THE PATTERN
When divine judgment arrives, it reaches the seats of earthly power and exposes their limits.
Then he speaks to them in the burning of his anger, and startles them with his scorching heat.And it shall be in that day that the LORD visits the host of the heights, in the heights, and the kings of the ground, upon the ground.And from his mouth goes out a sharp sword, so that with it he strikes the nations, and he shepherds them with a rod of iron, and he treads the winepress of the seething and swelling anger of God the all-ruling.THE THREAD
Then he speaks to them in the burning of his anger, and startles them with his scorching heat.Psalm 2 uses the same Hebrew word family for anger, af, preserving the image of nostril-flaring heat. Here, too, anger does not remain inward; it becomes an act upon those addressed.
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