What Does Psalm 38:7 Mean?
For my loins are filled with burning, and there is no unbroken place in my flesh.
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 loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh.THE KEY
Beneath “loathsome disease” is an image of burning; beneath “soundness” is wholeness, so the verse sets bodily heat against lost integrity.
THE MEANING
The verse gives bodily suffering a direct voice: burning fills the loins, and no wholeness remains in the flesh. The pain stands in its physical terms, without being disguised as something abstract.
THE ROOT
נִקְלֶה
niqleh
GROWS FROM
קלה
q-l-h
To roast or parch; here, the image of burning.
The Hebrew word rendered “loathsome disease” carries an image of burning. It gives the affliction a bodily texture: heat filling the loins.
ALSO GROWS
qālāh: To roast or parch
קָלָה
This verb supplies the root image of heat within the verse’s affliction.
qālî: Parched or roasted grain
קָלִי
This word shares the root’s image of something exposed to heat, making the verse’s burning quality more vivid.
מְתֹם
metom
GROWS FROM
תמם
t-m-m
To be complete or whole.
“unbroken place” in this verse is metom. “Soundness” carries the sense of completeness and integrity. The verse says that this wholeness is absent from the flesh.
ALSO GROWS
tam: Whole, complete, sound
תָּם
This branch makes clear that the missing soundness is a missing wholeness.
tamim: Whole, complete, intact
תָּמִים
Its sense of intactness sharpens the verse’s description of flesh with no undamaged place.
THE PATTERN
Scripture gives bodily suffering concrete names, letting pain appear in the body’s own terms.
My skin is black upon me, and my bones burn in the drought.For my days run out like smoke, and my bones burn like a hearth.And she had suffered much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was helped not at all, but rather grew worse,THE THREAD
From the sole of the foot to the head there is no unbroken place in it, but wounds, welts, and fresh blows. They have not been closed, nor bound up, nor softened with oil.Isaiah uses the same Hebrew word מְתֹם (metom), “wholeness” or “integrity,” for “soundness.” Its absence runs through the body there too, opening Psalm 38’s phrase as a loss of bodily wholeness.
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