What Does Psalm 79:3 Mean?
They pour out their blood like waters all around Jerusalem, and there is none to bury them.
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
Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them.THE KEY
The verb translated “shed” means “pour out,” showing violence as life emptied onto the ground and extended by denying the dead burial.
THE MEANING
You are looking at blood spilled as readily as water and people left without even the act of burial. That blood rings Yerushalayim (יְרוּשָׁלַיִם, Yerushalayim: the two wholenesses), surrounding the name of wholeness with violence against life.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this undoes is that violence ends with death: leaving the slain unburied carries the desecration beyond the moment of killing.
THE ROOT
שָׁפְכוּ
shafkhu
GROWS FROM
שָׁפַךְ
sh-p-kh
Pour out, spill.
“pour out” in this verse is shafkhu. The verb gives the blood a poured-out movement: life runs onto the ground. In Psalm 22:14 the same root describes a speaker as “poured out like water,” holding bodily collapse and bloodshed in one image of emptied life.
ALSO GROWS
shofekh: One who pours out or sheds.
שֹׁפֵךְ
Genesis 9:6 uses this form for the one who sheds human blood, making the act of pouring out life explicit.
nishpakhti: I am poured out.
נִשְׁפַּכְתִּי
Psalm 22:14 uses the same root in “I am poured out like water,” echoing this verse’s image of life flowing away.
קֹבֵר
qover
GROWS FROM
קָבַר
q-b-r
Bury, place in a grave.
“bury” in this verse is qover. The word names the act of burial, which is missing from the scene. Its branches name both the grave and the burial itself, so the verse shows the violence continuing into the denial of a final place for the dead.
ALSO GROWS
qeber: Grave, tomb.
קֶבֶר
The grave is the place the slain are denied when there is no one to bury them.
qevurah: Burial.
קְבוּרָה
The absence of burial makes the community’s failure to tend the dead part of the verse’s violence.
יְרוּשָׁלַיִם
Yerushalayim
GROWS FROM
שָׁלַם
sh-l-m
Be whole, complete.
“Jerusalem” in this verse is Yerushalayim. The name Yerushalayim carries shalom, wholeness, with a dual ending: the two wholenesses. Blood surrounds that name here, placing the language of wholeness beside the wreckage of life.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness.
שָׁלוֹם
The name’s shalom element sharpens the contrast between the city’s nature and the blood that encircles it.
shalem: Whole, complete.
שָׁלֵם
This branch names the state of wholeness that bloodshed and the denial of burial tear through.
THE PATTERN
Burial or its denial reveals how violence reaches beyond death into the community’s honoring of human life.
His corpse does not lodge on the tree through the night, but you surely bury him on that day, for the hanged one is a curse of God; so that your ground, which the LORD your God gives you as an inheritance, is not defiled.For behold, the LORD comes out of his place to visit upon those who settle in the earth their crookedness. The earth will uncover her blood, and will no more cover her struck ones.Then they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen wrappings with the spices, as is the custom of the Jews to bury.THE THREAD
I am poured out like waters, and all my bones come apart; my heart is like wax, melting within my inward parts.Psalm 22 uses שָׁפַךְ (shaphakh: pour out) for the speaker who says, “I am poured out like water.” Here that same verb describes blood surrounding the city, linking intimate bodily collapse with public slaughter.
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