What Does Psalm 77:18 Mean?
The voice of your thunder is in the wheel; the lightnings light the world; the earth quakes and shakes.
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
The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook.THE KEY
The thunder’s sound continues in the earth’s shaking: the Hebrew words for “thunder” and “shake” share two consonants, carrying the rumble from sky to ground.
THE MEANING
The verse shows divine power moving through the whole created world: thunder overhead, light across the earth, and the ground itself trembling. The physical world is part of the encounter, not merely its backdrop.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that divine power is only an inward feeling or an idea untouched by the physical world.
THE ROOT
רַעַם
ra'am
GROWS FROM
רעם
To thunder or roar.
The verse calls it the “voice of your thunder,” making the rumble itself a voice. Its root shares the consonants ר־ע (resh–ayin) with the root of “shook,” רעש (ra’ash, to quake): the sound seems to carry into the earth’s motion, though the words are from different roots.
ALSO GROWS
ra'am: Thunder.
רַעַם
This is the noun used in the phrase “thy thunder,” presented as a voice.
hir'im: To thunder or make a thunderous sound.
הִרְעִים
The verbal form shows the root describing thunder as an action, a sound in motion.
וַתִּרְעַשׁ
vati-ra'ash
GROWS FROM
רעש
To quake, shake, or roar.
“shakes” in this verse is vati-ra'ash. The earth’s shaking is expressed with רעש (ra’ash, to quake), echoing the opening consonants of רעם (ra’am, thunder). English separates the sky’s sound from the ground’s motion; the Hebrew sound-shape lets them reverberate through the same line.
ALSO GROWS
ra'ash: A shaking, quake, or tumult.
רַעַשׁ
The noun names the disturbance that makes the verse’s rumble physical.
hir'ish: To shake or cause a quake.
הִרְעִישׁ
This form shows the root as an action that moves what seemed steady.
THE PATTERN
When the divine voice enters the created world, its effects are physical: waters, mountains, and earth respond.
The voice of the LORD is upon the waters. The God of weight thunders. The LORD is upon many waters.And Mount Sinai smoked all over, because the LORD came down upon it in fire, and its smoke went up like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount trembled greatly.whose voice then shook the earth, but now he has promised, saying, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.”THE THREAD
whose voice then shook the earth, but now he has promised, saying, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.”This verse gives the same movement in a compressed form: voice, then earth shaken. It opens Psalm 77’s thunder as sound that reaches the ground beneath you.
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