What Does Psalm 69:23 Mean?
Let their eyes grow dark from seeing, and let their loins totter always.
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
Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake.THE KEY
The curse reaches past blindness to the body’s footing: sight goes dark as the loins are made to totter.
THE MEANING
This is a wish for an adversary’s perception and bodily steadiness to collapse: the eyes cannot see, and the loins continually stagger. Sight and the body’s support fail together, leaving no stable way to orient or stand. The verse keeps the violence of that wish in full view.
THE ROOT
הַמְעַד
hamʿad
GROWS FROM
מעד
To slip, totter, or stagger.
“totter” in this verse is hamʿad. The verb pictures lost footing: the loins are made to stagger. The same root describes a foot slipping elsewhere, so “shake” also carries the image of the body’s support giving way.
ALSO GROWS
māʿăḏāh: Slipped, describing a foot.
מָעֲדָה
Psalm 94:18 uses this root for a foot losing its footing, clarifying the instability in the image here.
ʾemʿāḏ: To slide or slip.
אֶמְעָד
Psalm 26:1 uses the same root in the speaker’s assurance that he will not slide, placing steadiness opposite the instability wished for here.
THE PATTERN
Scripture joins loss of sight with loss of footing as a collapse of orientation.
We grope along the wall like the blind, feeling our way as though we had no eyes. We stumble at noon as in dusk; among the fat ones we are as the dead.But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.THE THREAD
When I say, My foot slips; your faithful love, LORD, props me up.The same Hebrew root describes the loins tottering here and the speaker’s foot slipping in Psalm 94:18. There the speaker is held up; here the wish is for the body’s instability to continue.
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