What Does Psalm 79:7 Mean?
For they devour Jacob, and leave his pasture struck still.
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
For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place.THE KEY
The verse’s first verb turns conquest into eating: the people become what the destroyer consumes.
THE MEANING
The verse holds two losses together: a people are consumed, and the place that holds them is laid waste. The violence reaches the people and their dwelling at once; neither is hidden behind a softer word.
THE ROOT
אָכְלוּ
ʾākəlû
GROWS FROM
אכל
To eat or consume.
“devour” in this verse is ʾākəlû. The Hebrew verb makes the violence bodily: Jacob is treated as food to be consumed. The root also names ordinary eating, so the word’s familiar sense sharpens the horror of the image.
ALSO GROWS
ʾākal: To eat.
אָכַל
The basic verb holds the verse’s image of people being consumed.
maʾăkhāl: Food; something eaten.
מַאֲכָל
This noun from the same root makes explicit the image the verb implies: the devoured become what the destroyers feed on.
הֵשַׁמּוּ
hēshammû
GROWS FROM
שמם
To be desolate or devastated; to be appalled.
“struck still” in this verse is hēshammû. This root can describe both desolation and the stunned response to ruin. The line’s devastation empties a dwelling and leaves the destruction difficult to take in.
ALSO GROWS
shemāmāh: Desolation; a wasteland.
שְׁמָמָה
This noun names the emptied condition that the verse says has come upon Jacob’s dwelling.
shāmēm: To be desolate; to be appalled.
שָׁמֵם
The verb’s range joins the ruined place with the shock that its ruin produces.
THE PATTERN
Violence becomes communal devastation when it consumes people and leaves their sustaining place desolate.
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.But if you bite and devour one another, watch that you are not used up by one another.THE THREAD
Do all the workers of crookedness not perceive? They eat my people as they eat bread; they do not call out to the LORD.“Eat up” uses the same Hebrew root אכל (ʾākal, eat or consume) as “devoured” in Psalm 79:7. The comparison to eating bread makes the consumption of people feel brutally ordinary.
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