What Does Psalm 144:14 Mean?
That our oxen may be laden; that there be no breach, nor going out; that there be no outcry in our broad streets.
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
That our oxen may be strong to labour; that there be no breaking in, nor going out; that there be no complaining in our streets.THE KEY
The verse measures flourishing not by weightlessness, but by the capacity to bear real work without rupture or cries of distress.
THE MEANING
Your flourishing is pictured in work that can be carried, with no breach opening and no cry of distress filling the streets. The oxen are strong to labor, so wholeness here does not mean life without weight; it means life able to bear its work while public life remains intact.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that a whole life must be an unburdened life: its oxen are strong to labor, while rupture and public distress are absent.
THE ROOT
מְסֻבָּלִים
mesubbalim
GROWS FROM
סבל
to carry or bear a load
“laden” in this verse is mesubbalim. The Hebrew מְסֻבָּלִים (mesubbalim, burden-bearing or loaded) makes strength concrete as the capacity to carry. The English phrase “strong to labour” holds that strength; the root adds the image of bearing weight.
ALSO GROWS
sebel: burden or load
סֵבֶל
The same seed names what the oxen can carry, so their strength appears as capacity under weight.
sabbal: burden-bearer or porter
סַבָּל
This branch names the bearer itself, echoing the verse’s picture of work sustained by those able to carry.
פֶּרֶץ
perets
GROWS FROM
פרץ
to break through or burst out
A breach is not merely damage; it is a break-through that opens what had been held together. The verse places this rupture beside burden-bearing and street cries, making communal wholeness visible in what does not break open.
ALSO GROWS
parats: to break through or burst forth
פָּרַץ
The verb shows the force inside “breach”: a boundary gives way.
perets: breach or break-through
פֶּרֶץ
Isaiah’s “repairer of the breach” uses this same noun, showing that the rupture named here can also be repaired.
THE PATTERN
A flourishing community can bear its work while its shared spaces remain free of rupture and distress.
Those who come from you shall build the dry ruins of the ages. You shall raise up the foundations of generation to generation, and you shall be called the mender of the breach, the one who turns the paths back to dwell in.The broad streets of the city shall be filled with boys and girls laughing in them.So that there would be no split in the body, but that the limbs would tend one another alike.THE THREAD
Even to old age I AM, and to gray hair I will bear you. I have made, and I will lift, I will bear, and I will slip you free.The same root, סבל (sabal, to bear a load), appears in Isaiah’s promise, “I will bear.” Psalm 144 pictures oxen able to carry their work; Isaiah turns that image toward God as the one who bears the reader.
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