What Does Psalm 139:12 Mean?
Even darkness does not darken from you; the night lights up like day, and darkness is as light to you.
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
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.THE KEY
Darkness does not merely fail to hide from God; it cannot darken anything for the one to whom night shines as day.
THE MEANING
What you cannot see remains visible to God; night does not diminish God’s sight. Darkness and light are equally open to the one who sees you.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that what is hidden from human eyes is hidden from God falls away here: darkness changes your view, not God’s.
THE ROOT
יַחְשִׁיךְ
yakhshikh
GROWS FROM
חשך
ḥ-š-k
To be dark, grow dark, or darken.
The Hebrew uses the same חשך seed for “darkness” and “hideth”: darkness does not darken anything for God. Concealment and darkness meet in one image, so night cannot dim what God sees.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōšeḵ: Darkness.
חֹשֶׁךְ
This is the noun for darkness in the verse; the same root appears as both the darkness and the act of darkening.
ḥāšaḵ: To be dark or grow dark.
חָשַׁךְ
This verbal form makes the verse’s wordplay clear: darkness itself cannot bring dimness to God’s sight.
יָאִיר
ya'ir
GROWS FROM
אור
ʾ-w-r
Light; to be or become light, to shine.
“lights up” in this verse is ya'ir. The verb translated “shineth” comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for light. Night does not borrow a different kind of sight here; it shines as day before God.
ALSO GROWS
ʾôr: Light.
אוֹר
The verse’s closing comparison names light directly, joining the shining verb to its root noun.
māʾôr: A luminary, a source of light.
מָאוֹר
This branch carries the root into the things that give light, echoing the verse’s picture of night shining like day.
THE PATTERN
Darkness changes what people can see, but it cannot place anything beyond God’s sight.
There is no darkness, and no deepest darkness, where the workers of crookedness can hide themselves.And no creation is hidden before him, but all things are naked and bared at the throat to the eyes of him to whom our account belongs.This, then, is the message we have heard from him, and we declare to you, that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.THE THREAD
If I say, Surely darkness crushes me, even the night is light around me.The verse before this imagines darkness covering the speaker, then verse 12 repeats the same Hebrew root in “darken.” Darkness may cover from a human vantage, but it cannot darken the scene for God.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
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