What Does Psalm 114:8 Mean?
who turns the rock into a pool of waters, the flint into a spring of waters.
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
Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.THE KEY
The rock itself becomes the spring: what looks most sealed is turned into a place where water gathers and rises.
THE MEANING
The verse presents a living reversal: the rock becomes a pool, and flint becomes a spring. The hard thing does not only open a path for water; it becomes water’s gathering place and source. Where the reader sees only hardness, this verse holds open the possibility of a source arising there.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that hardness fixes a thing’s future: here, the hardest material changes form and becomes a source.
THE ROOT
הַהֹפְכִי
hahōphekhī
GROWS FROM
הפך
turn, overturn, transform
“turns” in this verse is hahōphekhī. The Hebrew הַהֹפְכִי (hahōphekhī, the one turning) comes from הפך (hāphakh, to turn or overturn), a root whose branches include both change and overthrow. The verse’s force is not merely that water comes from stone: the stone’s state is reversed, becoming a pool and a spring.
ALSO GROWS
hāphakh: To turn, overturn, or transform.
הָפַךְ
The rock’s change into a pool is a concrete turning of one state into another.
mahpekhah: An overturning or overthrow.
מַהְפֵּכָה
The same root can name a sweeping reversal, echoing the verse’s change of hard stone into gathered water.
מַעְיָן
maʿyan
GROWS FROM
עין
eye; a spring or source where water wells into view
The Hebrew מַעְיָן (maʿyan, spring or source) belongs to the word family of עַיִן (ʿayin, eye): a spring is pictured as an eye, the place water opens into view. Beside flint, the image becomes more than liquid emerging; the stone becomes the opening where hidden water appears.
ALSO GROWS
ʿayin: An eye; also used for a spring or welling source of water.
עַיִן
The spring’s name carries the image of an opening through which water comes into view.
maʿyanot: Springs or sources of water.
מַעְיָנוֹת
This plural form keeps the spring’s sense of water rising from a visible source.
THE PATTERN
Life-giving water appears where the visible landscape offers no source.
Look, I will stand before you there on the rock in Horeb. You will strike the rock, and waters will come out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so before the eyes of the elders of Israel.Behold, I am making a new thing; now it sprouts; will you not perceive it? I will even lay a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the parched land.The one who leans his weight into me, as the writing has said, rivers of living waters will flow from his belly.THE THREAD
Look, I will stand before you there on the rock in Horeb. You will strike the rock, and waters will come out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so before the eyes of the elders of Israel.Both verses name the rock with צוּר (tsur, rock), and Exodus says water comes out of it after it is struck. Psalm 114:8 carries the same stone-and-water image further: the rock becomes a pool, and the flint becomes a spring.
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