What Does Psalm 31:10 Mean?
For my life runs out with grief, and my years in groaning; my strength stumbles in my crookedness, and my bones waste away.
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
For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “bones” shares its root with words for might and substance, so the verse pictures grief consuming the body’s very core.
THE MEANING
Here, grief spends your life and sighing fills your years; your strength stumbles because of your crookedness, and your bones are consumed. The verse holds grief, personal crookedness, and bodily collapse in one present account, with none reduced to mere feeling.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that grief stays inward and leaves the body’s strength untouched.
THE ROOT
עֲצָמַי
ʿaṣāmay
GROWS FROM
עצם
Bone, substance, or self; the related verbal sense is to grow strong or mighty.
עֶצֶם names a bone and can also mean the self or substance; the same root forms a word for might. As the bones are consumed and strength stumbles, grief reaches the person’s substance, not merely a passing mood.
ALSO GROWS
ʿeṣem: Bone; also substance or self.
עֶצֶם
The branch carries bodily structure and the person’s own substance in one word.
ʿāṣûm: Mighty, strong, or great in number.
עָצוּם
This related form brings the verse’s failing strength into the same root family as its consumed bones.
כָּשַׁל
kāšal
GROWS FROM
כשל
To stumble, totter, or falter.
“stumbles” in this verse is kāšal. The verse’s word for failing strength pictures it as stumbling. The image is not only loss of force, but a loss of footing under the weight of what is happening.
ALSO GROWS
mikhshol: A stumbling block or obstacle.
מִכְשׁוֹל
The shared root shows how stumbling can name both a faltering state and what trips someone.
nikhshal: One who stumbles or falters.
נִכְשָׁל
This form makes the verse’s image of strength stumbling part of a broader root family of faltering.
כָּלוּ
kālû
GROWS FROM
כלה
To come to an end, be finished, or be brought to completion.
“runs out” in this verse is kālû. The Hebrew behind “spent” can describe something reaching its end. That language frames grief as consuming the span of life, while the verse’s closing image carries the depletion into the bones through a different root.
ALSO GROWS
kālāh: To come to an end or be finished.
כָּלָה
This form shows the sense of a life or span reaching its limit.
killāh: To bring to an end or consume.
כִּלָּה
This related form makes the verse’s “spent” language resonate with the wider image of depletion.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives sorrow bodily reach, showing it exhausting time, strength, and the body itself.
Show me favor, O LORD, for I am withering; O LORD, heal me, for my bones are shaken.For my days run out like smoke, and my bones burn like a hearth.Then he said to them, My living soul is pained all around, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.THE THREAD
For my days run out like smoke, and my bones burn like a hearth.The Hebrew for “days are consumed” repeats the root כלה behind “my life is spent” here, while “bones” repeats עצם. This verse joins time running out and the body burning in one lament, extending Psalm 31’s language through the whole person.
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