What Does Psalm 25:6 Mean?
Remember your compassions, LORD, and your faithful love, for they are from the ages.
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
Remember, O LORD, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindnesses; for they have been ever of old.THE KEY
“Tender mercies” shares its Hebrew root with “womb”: the compassion this verse recalls is life-holding tenderness that reaches beyond this moment.
THE MEANING
Your present moment is met by compassion and faithful love that the verse describes as reaching back through the ages. The prayer’s “remember” calls that enduring tenderness into the present.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that God’s compassion is only a new response to the present: the verse names it as belonging to the ages.
THE ROOT
רַחֲמִים
raḥamim
GROWS FROM
ר־ח־ם
r-ḥ-m
This root names compassion and shares its consonants with the Hebrew word for womb.
“compassions” in this verse is raḥamim. The verse’s “tender mercies” is raḥamim (רַחֲמִים), from the same root as rechem (רֶחֶם), “womb.” The word family holds compassion as tenderness that sustains life, giving the prayer’s appeal to remember a deeply intimate quality.
ALSO GROWS
rechem: Womb
רֶחֶם
The shared root lets the verse’s compassion carry the sense of life-holding tenderness.
raḥum: Compassionate, merciful
רַחוּם
This adjective describes the compassionate character the prayer calls upon.
חֶסֶד
ḥesed
GROWS FROM
ח־ס־ד
ḥ-s-d
Faithful love, kindness, and loyalty expressed through steadfast care.
The verse pairs compassion with ḥesed (חֶסֶד), faithful love that endures through time. Its word family describes both faithful people and the active expression of loyalty, placing this prayer within a bond already lived out.
ALSO GROWS
ḥasid: A faithful, devoted person
חָסִיד
The word family moves from faithful love to the person characterized by that loyalty.
tithassad: You act faithfully or loyally
תִּתְחַסָּד
This verbal form shows the same word family as loyalty enacted in a relationship.
THE PATTERN
Scripture presents divine compassion as enduring care that holds people through vulnerability and suffering.
And the LORD passed by before his face, and called out, The LORD, The LORD God, compassionate and full of favor, slow to flare, abounding in faithful love and truth,Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she would not have compassion on the son of her womb? Even they may forget, but I will not forget you.Look, we count them flourishing who remain under it. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the end of the LORD, for the LORD is very tender in his inward parts, and moved to groan.THE THREAD
As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those in awe of him.The Hebrew word translated “pitieth” comes from the same root, ר־ח־ם (r-ḥ-m), as the “tender mercies” in this verse. Psalm 103 gives that compassion a close, parental image: tenderness that holds and cares for a person.
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