What Does Psalm 7:15 Mean?
He digs a pit and hollows it out, and falls into the pit he works.
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
He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.THE KEY
The Hebrew root behind “ditch” also carries the sense of corruption and ruin, so the trap already holds its maker’s destruction within it.
THE MEANING
A harm designed for someone else becomes the ground of its maker’s own collapse. The person who imagines a trap can stay separate from its consequences finds the thing made closing around its maker.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this verse undoes is that a person can set ruin in motion against someone else and remain untouched by it.
THE ROOT
שַׁחַת
shaḥat
GROWS FROM
שחת
shachath
To corrupt, ruin, or destroy; the related noun can mean a pit or destruction.
English gives the verse a hole in the ground, while the Hebrew root also carries the sense of ruin and corruption. The pit is already named with the destruction it brings, and the maker falls into what he has set in motion.
ALSO GROWS
shichet: To corrupt or ruin.
שִׁחֵת
The same root describes the earth as corrupt in Genesis 6:11, linking the image of a pit with a wider picture of ruin.
mashchit: One who destroys.
מַשְׁחִית
Exodus 12:23 uses this form for the destroyer, showing the root’s force as active destruction.
THE PATTERN
What a person sets in motion can return upon them as the consequence of their own making.
Whoever digs a pit falls into it; whoever rolls a stone, it turns back upon him.The nations sink into the pit they made; in the net they hid, their own foot is caught.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
For you do not leave my living soul to Sheol; you do not give your faithful one to see the pit.The word for “ditch” here is שַׁחַת (shaḥat; pit), from שחת (shachath; ruin, corruption, destruction), the same root behind “corruption” in this verse. That shared root lets the pit read as more than a hole: it is ruin taking shape.
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