What Does Psalm 119:126 Mean?
It is time for you, LORD, to act; they have broken your instruction.
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
It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void thy law.THE KEY
They can make God’s instruction void in practice, but that very breach becomes the summons for God to act.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks into a moment when God’s instruction is treated as empty: the breach is real, but it does not make the matter disappear. The appeal for the LORD to work rises precisely where people break its force.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that dismissing God’s instruction makes its claim vanish; here, that dismissal itself is the reason for the call to divine action.
THE ROOT
הֵפֵרוּ
hēp̄ērû
GROWS FROM
פָּרַר
to break, violate, frustrate, or bring to nothing
The verb names an act of breaking, and the same root describes breaking a covenant. People make the breach, but their act does not erase what they have broken; it becomes the setting for the appeal that God act.
ALSO GROWS
hēp̄ēr: he broke or annulled
הֵפֵר
This verb form shows that “made void” carries the force of an act of breaking, not merely something fading away.
hafarah: annulment or violation
הֲפָרָה
The noun names the breach itself, making visible what the verse says people have done to the instruction.
תּוֹרָתֶךָ
tôrāteḵā
GROWS FROM
יָרָה
to cast or point; in its teaching form, to direct or instruct
The word translated “law” is תּוֹרָה (tôrāh, instruction), from a root that also carries the sense of pointing or directing. What people void here is a direction meant to guide; the verse calls for God to act where that direction is refused.
ALSO GROWS
yārāh: to cast, point, or direct
יָרָה
Its sense of pointing gives instruction the image of a direction offered for a path.
mōreh: teacher or instructor
מוֹרֶה
The teacher directs through instruction, showing how the root connects guidance with the act of teaching.
THE PATTERN
When people break the force of divine instruction, the breach becomes the place where its consequences and God’s work are revealed.
The earth is soiled beneath those who settle in it, because they have crossed over the instruction, exchanged the statutes, broken the covenant of the ages.Making the word of God void through your handing down, which you have handed down. And many things like these you do.And this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom the Adversary has bound, look, these eighteen years, ought she not to be unbound from this binding on the sabbath day?THE THREAD
The earth is soiled beneath those who settle in it, because they have crossed over the instruction, exchanged the statutes, broken the covenant of the ages.Isaiah uses the same Hebrew verb הֵפֵרוּ (hēp̄ērû, they have broken) for breaking the everlasting covenant. The shared root shows the breach as a rupture of what binds, giving the Psalm’s call for God to act its full force.
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