What Does Psalm 50:12 Mean?
If I hungered, I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and what fills it.
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
If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.THE KEY
Even in the imagined case that God is hungry, the world’s fullness already belongs to him.
THE MEANING
The verse faces the thought that God needs what you give him: even if he were hungry, you would not need to inform him. The world and everything filling it already belong to him. Your gift does not supply a lack in God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that God depends on your contribution to meet a need.
THE ROOT
מְלֹאָהּ
melo'ah
GROWS FROM
מלא
To be full; to fill.
“what fills it” in this verse is melo'ah. The word for “fulness” grows from the same root as “to fill.” The verse names the filled world itself as belonging to God, so its abundance is not a supply he receives from you.
ALSO GROWS
male': Full.
מָלֵא
The world’s fullness is not an abstract quality; it is the condition of what is filled.
millē': To fill, make full.
מִלֵּא
This branch makes the connection active: the fullness named here is what fills the world.
melo': Fullness, the whole of what fills something.
מְלוֹא
It echoes the verse’s claim that the world and all its fullness belong to God.
THE PATTERN
What fills the world already belongs to God; human gifts do not supply what is his.
A Psalm of David. The earth is the LORD's, and what fills it; the inhabited world, and those who settle in it.Who has gone before me, that I should repay him? Everything under all the heavens is mine.For the earth is the Lord's, and what fills it.THE THREAD
A Psalm of David. The earth is the LORD's, and what fills it; the inhabited world, and those who settle in it.Psalm 24:1 uses the same Hebrew noun מְלֹאָהּ (melo’ah, “fullness”), from מלא (male’, “to be full; to fill”). It opens “the world and its fullness” as one claim: everything that fills the earth already belongs to God.
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