What Does Psalm 68:23 Mean?
So that your foot may be bathed in blood, and the tongue of your dogs from the enemies, from 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
That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.THE KEY
The verse makes victory impossible to sanitize: blood marks the feet, and dogs lick it.
THE MEANING
You are given an image of triumph with no veil over its violence: the enemies’ blood reaches the foot, and the dogs’ tongues touch it. Victory remains physical and disturbing here, rather than becoming an abstract idea.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the expectation that divine triumph must always be pictured as bloodless or gentle.
THE ROOT
תְּמַחַץ
tĕmaḥaṣ
GROWS FROM
מחץ
To crush, strike through, or wound.
“bathed” in this verse is tĕmaḥaṣ. The verb rendered “dipped” comes from מָחַץ (māḥaṣ), meaning “to crush” or “strike through,” bringing the force of violent defeat into the image. The same root can describe a wound and a blow that strikes through; here it joins the blood beneath the foot to the language of crushing defeat.
ALSO GROWS
māḥaṣtî: “I have wounded,” in Deuteronomy 32:39.
מָחַצְתִּי
The same root connects the blood in this verse with the language of a wound.
ūmāḥăṣāh: Jael’s blow through Sisera’s temples, in Judges 5:26.
וּמָחֲצָה
This branch shows the root’s force in an image of bodily violence and decisive defeat.
THE PATTERN
Scripture sometimes depicts divine victory through the bodily, bloody defeat of its enemies, without hiding the violence in the image.
He judges among the nations, filling them with corpses, and he shatters the heads over the wide land.I make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword devours flesh, from the blood of the pierced and the taken, from the head of the unleashed enemy.And from his mouth goes out a sharp sword, so that with it he strikes the nations, and he shepherds them with a rod of iron, and he treads the winepress of the seething and swelling anger of God the all-ruling.THE THREAD
She stretched out her hand to the peg, and her right hand to the hammer of the toilers. With the hammer she struck Sisera, she shattered his head, and passed through his crushed temples.The Hebrew verb translated “stricken through” uses מחץ (māḥaṣ), the same root as the verb behind “dipped” here. That shared root links the blood underfoot to scripture’s direct language for a blow that crushes and pierces.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us