What Does Psalm 69:25 Mean?
Let their encampment become desolate, and let no one settle in their tents.
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 habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents.THE KEY
The tents remain in the sentence, but everyone who made them a home is gone.
THE MEANING
The verse gives voice now to a wish that the homes of its enemies be emptied completely. It asks for no one to remain in their tents; the violence of the wish is total in the words themselves.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the belief that prayer always asks for an enemy’s change of heart; this line asks for no enemy to remain in their home.
THE ROOT
נְשַׁמָּה
nəšammāh
GROWS FROM
שׁמם
š-m-m
To be desolate or devastated; related forms also describe being appalled or stunned.
The word translated “desolate” grows from שׁמם (š-m-m), a root whose forms name both a place laid waste and the shock of beholding devastation. The next line makes that devastation concrete: the tents are named, but no dweller remains.
ALSO GROWS
shemamah: Desolation, wasteland
שְׁמָמָה
This noun from the same root names the state of emptiness the verse calls upon.
shamem: To be desolate or appalled
שָׁמֵם
The root can describe a ruined place and the stunned response to its ruin, joining the landscape with the experience of seeing it.
יֹשֵׁב
yōšēv
GROWS FROM
ישב
y-š-b
To sit, remain, settle, or dwell.
“settle” in this verse is yōšēv. The word translated “dwell” is יֹשֵׁב (yōšēv), “one who sits or remains”; the root holds dwelling and settled presence together. With “let none” before it, the verse pictures a household entirely emptied of anyone who can stay.
ALSO GROWS
yāšav: To sit, remain, or dwell
יָשַׁב
The verb carries dwelling as a staying presence, which the verse calls absent from the tents.
mōšāv: Dwelling, seat, or settlement
מוֹשָׁב
This related word names a place made for settled presence, sharpening the emptiness of a home with no one left to inhabit it.
THE PATTERN
In judgment, a dwelling’s vacancy becomes the visible sign that its inhabitants have been removed.
Your land lies emptied, and your cities are burned by fire. Strangers eat your ground before your eyes, and it lies emptied, as overturned by strangers.In my ears, the LORD of hosts says, Surely many houses shall be emptied, even the great and the fair, without one who settles.Look, your house is left to you, empty.THE THREAD
For it is written in the book of Psalms, "Let his enclosure become empty, and let no one settle in it," and, "Let another take up his watch."Acts 1:20 repeats this line with “his” in place of “their,” then adds that another is to take his office. The vacancy in the image becomes a place emptied of its occupant and assigned to another.
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