What Does Psalm 4:2 Mean?
O sons of men, how long will you turn my weight into shame? How long will you love emptiness and seek what fails? Selah.
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
O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Selah.THE KEY
The verse exposes a reversal of value: what has weight is made shameful while emptiness and falsehood become objects of love and pursuit.
THE MEANING
The question confronts you with an ongoing exchange: what has weight is turned into disgrace, while emptiness is loved and falsehood pursued. The repeated “how long” makes the contradiction visible as a sustained allegiance. The verse names the pattern without disguising what it is.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that desire can make an empty pursuit substantial: what is empty remains empty, even when it is loved.
THE ROOT
כְּבוֹדִי
kevodi
GROWS FROM
כבד
k-b-d
To be heavy or weighty; by extension, to carry honor or importance.
The word for glory carries the sense of weight. The verse says that what has weight is turned into disgrace, so the injury is a reversal of value: what should be treated as weighty is recast as contemptible.
ALSO GROWS
kaved: Heavy, weighty.
כָּבֵד
The physical sense of weight shows what lies beneath glory: something with substance and consequence.
kibbed: To honor or treat as weighty.
כִּבֵּד
Honor is the act of giving weight; turning glory into shame reverses what is treated as worthy.
רִיק
riq
GROWS FROM
ריק
r-y-q
To be empty or to empty out.
The word points to emptiness itself, not merely to something foolish. Beside the pursuit of falsehood, it shows desire fastening onto what has no substance to hold.
ALSO GROWS
req: Empty, void of substance.
רֵיק
This form makes plain that what is loved here is defined by its emptiness.
reqam: Empty-handed or without result.
רֵיקָם
The shared root connects emptiness with an outcome that leaves nothing in hand.
heriq: To empty or pour out.
הֵרִיק
This verbal branch gives emptiness motion: what is pursued can leave a person emptied.
כָזָב
kazav
GROWS FROM
כזב
k-z-b
To lie or be false.
“what fails” in this verse is kazav. The word rendered “leasing” names falsehood, and its root also works as a verb meaning to lie or be false. The verse pairs that deception with emptiness, exposing the object of pursuit as both insubstantial and untrue.
ALSO GROWS
kazav: To lie or prove false.
כָּזַב
The verb makes falsehood an active deception, not just an inaccurate idea.
kazav: A lie or falsehood.
כָּזָב
This noun names what the verse says people seek.
THE PATTERN
When people give allegiance to what is false and empty, they exchange what has weight for shame and take on the shape of what they pursue.
Those who make them are like them, everyone who leans on them.who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and bowed down and served the creation beside the one who created, who is praised for the ages. Amen.THE THREAD
On God rests my deliverance and my weight; the rock of my strength and my shelter is in God.This verse uses the same Hebrew word כָּבוֹד (kavod, glory and weight) as the current verse, but places the speaker’s glory in God. That shared word opens the question further: the verse can describe weight turned to shame, while this one locates the speaker’s weight in God.
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