What Does Psalm 18:5 Mean?
The cords of the hollow circle me; the snares of death meet me.
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 sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.THE KEY
The verse turns anguish into a trap with no open side: Sheol’s cords circle you while death’s snares come to meet you.
THE MEANING
When death’s pressure closes around you, it feels like cords on every side and traps arriving ahead of you. The verse gives that terror a concrete shape: you are enclosed and confronted before any way out is visible.
THE ROOT
חבלי
ḥevlē
GROWS FROM
חבל
To bind or form a cord; the word family also names the constriction of travail.
The Hebrew word translated “sorrows” carries the image of cords, and the same word family can name labor pangs. Anguish here is not only an inward feeling; it is pressure that grips and constricts.
ALSO GROWS
ḥevel: Cord, rope, or binding line
חֶבֶל
It makes the verse’s suffering feel like something physically wrapped around the speaker.
ḥevlei leidah: Birth pangs
חֶבְלֵי לֵדָה
The same word family describes pain as constriction, giving “sorrows” a bodily force.
קדמני
qiddemuni
GROWS FROM
קדם
To come before, meet, or confront.
“meet me” in this verse is qiddemuni. Here “prevented” carries its older sense of “came before me,” not simply “stopped me.” The danger confronts you on the path ahead, so the verse maps threat both around you and in front of you.
ALSO GROWS
qedem: The front, the east, or what lies before
קֶדֶם
Its spatial sense helps show why this root can describe danger arriving ahead of the speaker.
qiddem: Met or confronted
קִדֵּם
This verb form preserves the older sense behind the KJV’s “prevented me.”
מוקשי
moqeshei
GROWS FROM
יקש
To trap or set a snare.
“snares of death” in this verse is moqeshei. The noun belongs to a root that names trapping. Death appears here as a trap laid across the way, not merely as a distant endpoint.
ALSO GROWS
yaqosh: To ensnare or set a trap
יָקֹשׁ
The verb makes the snare an action that catches and constrains.
moqesh: A snare or trap
מוֹקֵשׁ
This is the singular noun behind the “snares” surrounding the speaker.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives mortal danger a bodily shape as cords, enclosing waters, and a hold that can be loosed.
The cords of death wrap around me, and the narrows of Sheol find me; I find the narrow place and sorrow.The waters surrounded me up to my living soul; the deep closed in around me, and reeds wrapped about my head.God raised him up, having loosed the labor pangs of death, for it was not possible for him to be held by it.THE THREAD
The cords of death wrap around me, and the narrows of Sheol find me; I find the narrow place and sorrow.Psalm 116 repeats חבלי (ḥevlē), the cords or pangs, but names death rather than Sheol. The shared word shows that these “sorrows” carry the force of a constricting grip.
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