What Does Psalm 35:5 Mean?
Let them be like chaff before the breath, and let the messenger of the LORD thrust them 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
Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the LORD chase them.THE KEY
The verse strips the threat of solidity: before the wind the enemy is chaff, while the LORD’s messenger drives them away.
THE MEANING
The hostility facing you has no permanence here: the verse pictures its force as chaff before the wind. The LORD’s messenger chases and drives the attackers away; the image names their expulsion without softening it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this undoes is that the ones pursuing you are too solid to be moved and will have the last word.
THE ROOT
רוּחַ
ruach
GROWS FROM
רוח
ruach
The word holds wind, breath, and spirit together.
English renders רוּחַ here as “wind,” but Hebrew uses the same word for wind, breath, and spirit. The verse’s scattering force carries the same word used for the breath of life, while its immediate image remains severe: chaff swept before it.
ALSO GROWS
ruach: Wind: moving air, as it scatters the chaff in this verse.
רוּחַ
This is the force before which the attackers lose their footing.
ruach: Breath: the air moving through a living body.
רוּחַ
The same Hebrew word that names the wind here also names the breath that animates life.
ruach: Spirit: the animating presence or force.
רוּחַ
This shared word lets the verse’s wind-image carry a wider sense of animating force without changing the immediate scene.
THE PATTERN
What is weightless before the LORD’s force is scattered and driven from its place.
The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff that the breath blows away.They are like straw before the breath, and like chaff that a storm steals away.Whose winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean his threshing floor, and gather the wheat into the barn; but the chaff he will burn up with fire that cannot be put out.THE THREAD
The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff that the breath blows away.Psalm 1:4 uses the same image and the same Hebrew word רוּחַ (ruach, wind): the chaff is driven away by the wind. Here the image sharpens into pursuit: what the wind scatters, the LORD’s messenger drives off.
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