What Does Psalm 51:17 Mean?
The slaughtered offerings of God are a broken breath; a broken and crushed heart, O God, you do not despise.
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
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.THE KEY
The offering God receives is the person within, the breath and heart laid open in their brokenness.
THE MEANING
Your breath can be fractured and your heart crushed without becoming contemptible to God. Here, the inward person is the offering, and God does not despise it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that inward brokenness makes you unacceptable to God: the verse names that very condition as an offering God does not despise.
THE ROOT
רוּחַ
ruach
GROWS FROM
רוח
r-w-ḥ
Breath, wind, moving air.
The English word spirit can sound like a separate compartment, but ruach also names breath and wind. Those senses keep the broken inner life here connected to the breath moving through you.
ALSO GROWS
ruach: Breath
רוּחַ
The verse’s broken spirit is also broken breath: the image reaches into the life moving within you.
ruach: Wind
רוּחַ
The same word names moving air, holding breath, wind, and spirit together in one image.
נִשְׁבָּרָה
nishbarah
GROWS FROM
שבר
sh-b-r
Break, shatter, break into pieces.
“broken” in this verse is nishbarah. The verse uses this breaking first for ruach and then for the heart. The repeated root makes the inner offering a shared rupture of breath and heart, not merely a passing feeling.
ALSO GROWS
nishbarah: Broken, shattered
נִשְׁבָּרָה
This is the verse’s description of the breath; the same root returns in the broken heart.
shever: A break, fracture, breach
שֶׁבֶר
This noun carries the same break into a state or result, showing how the root names more than an action: it names the rupture itself.
נִדְכֶּה
nidkeh
GROWS FROM
דכא
d-k-ʾ
Crush, press down, break down.
Contrite can sound chiefly like regret, but this root adds the force of being crushed. Beside shabar, it gives the heart two images of rupture: broken and pressed down.
ALSO GROWS
dakka: Crushed, broken down
דַּכָּא
This form shows the physical force carried by contrite in the verse.
dakkei: Crushed ones
דַּכְּאֵי
The same root can describe people in a crushed condition, extending the verse’s image beyond a moment of regret.
THE PATTERN
God’s nearness meets the inwardly broken with regard rather than contempt.
The LORD is near to those whose heart is broken, and delivers those crushed in breath.For thus says the high and lifted one, who dwells in the ages, whose nature is set apart. I dwell in the high and set-apart place, and with the crushed and the low of breath, to revive the breath of the low, and to revive the heart of the crushed ones.Flourishing are the emptied in breath, for theirs is the governance of the heavens.THE THREAD
The LORD is near to those whose heart is broken, and delivers those crushed in breath.Psalm 51 applies the root שבר (sh-b-r, break) to the breath and then the heart; Psalm 34 applies that same root to the heart. The repeated break opens into a promise of nearness, not rejection.
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