What Does Psalm 57:10 Mean?
For your faithful love is great up to the heavens, and your truth up to the clouds.
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 thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds.THE KEY
The verse sets faithful love and truth on one limitless horizon, showing that tenderness and reliability belong together.
THE MEANING
God’s faithful love toward you reaches beyond the limits you can see, and God’s truth extends as far as the clouds. The sky holds both images together: love that remains loyal and truth that stands firm.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that God’s faithful love or truth runs out at the edge of what you can see or measure.
THE ROOT
חֶסֶד
ḥesed
GROWS FROM
חסד
Loyal kindness; steadfast care within a relationship.
The word holds more than pity: it carries the nature of faithful love. Its reach to the heavens gives that loyalty a scale larger than any visible limit.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāsad: To act loyally or show kindness.
חָסַד
The verb shows chesed as care expressed through action, not merely a feeling.
ḥāsid: A faithful or loyal person.
חָסִיד
This branch names someone by the same quality of steadfast care that the verse places across the heavens.
אֱמֶת
ʾemet
GROWS FROM
אמן
Firmness, steadiness, and reliability.
Truth here carries the sense of what is firm and dependable. Its root also gives rise to the language of trust and “Amen,” joining truth to something a person can lean on and affirm.
ALSO GROWS
ʾemunah: Trust, steadiness, faithfulness.
אֱמוּנָה
It shares the root of emet and makes visible the link between truth and dependable trust.
ʾamen: Firm; truly; so be it.
אָמֵן
Amen echoes the same root’s sense of firmness, as an affirmation that what is said can be trusted.
גָּדוֹל
gādōl
GROWS FROM
גדל
To grow or become great.
The word for great comes from a root of growth and increasing stature. Beside the heavens and clouds, it gives the love and truth in the verse an image of vastness.
ALSO GROWS
gādal: To grow or become great.
גָּדַל
The verb carries the growth contained in the adjective “great.”
migdal: Tower.
מִגְדָּל
A tower rises in height, extending the root’s image of growing stature.
THE PATTERN
God’s faithful love and trustworthiness exceed the measures of the created world.
For your faithful love is great above the heavens, and your truth reaches to the clouds.For as the heavens are high above the earth, so mighty is his faithful love over those in awe of him.And to know the love of the Anointed One, which is thrown beyond knowing, that you might be filled to all the fullness of God.THE THREAD
Your faithful love, O LORD, is in the heavens; and your steadiness reaches to the clouds.The Hebrew pairs chesed, “faithful love,” with emunah, “trust” or “steadiness,” which shares a root with emet, “truth.” The parallel verse makes clear that love and truth are joined by a common language of faithful reliability.
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