What Does Psalm 80:16 Mean?
It is burned with fire; it is cut down. They perish at the rebuke of your face.
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
It is burned with fire, it is cut down: they perish at the rebuke of thy countenance.THE KEY
The vine’s end is not only burning and cutting: “perish” also carries the Hebrew sense of being lost.
THE MEANING
What was planted is now burned and cut down; at the rebuke of God’s face, they are lost. The verse holds the ruin in full view: fire, cutting, and the loss that follows.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Being planted does not make something untouchable by ruin.
THE ROOT
יֹאבֵדוּ
yōʾbēdû
GROWS FROM
אבד
ʾ-b-d
Be lost, perish, or go missing.
The verb translated “perish” comes from a root that also means “be lost.” The ending is more than destruction: the verse holds together perishing and becoming lost under the rebuke of God’s face.
ALSO GROWS
ʾōbēd: Lost, gone astray, or perishing.
אָבֵד
This form shows how the root can describe both an ending and the state of being lost.
ʾăbēdāh: Loss; something that has gone missing.
אֲבֵדָה
It makes the root’s language of loss visible in a noun, deepening what “they perish” holds here.
שְׂרֻפָה
śərufāh
GROWS FROM
שרף
ś-r-p
Burn or consume by fire.
The word for “burned” shares its root with “seraph,” a word for a fiery being. The verse’s consuming fire and the name of the fiery beings belong to the same Hebrew word family.
ALSO GROWS
śārāf: A fiery being; a seraph.
שָׂרָף
The shared root links the vine’s burning with the word English readers may know from “seraph.”
śərēfāh: Burning or a fire that consumes.
שְׂרֵפָה
This noun keeps the emphasis on fire as an active consuming force.
THE PATTERN
A planted life can be exposed to judgment, severed, and brought to an end in fire.
Come, I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be eaten up. I will break through its wall, and it shall be trampled.If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown out as a branch and dries up, and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they burn.But what bears thorns and thistles fails the test, and is near a curse; its end is the burning.THE THREAD
For the LORD perceives the way of the aligned, but the way of the wicked loses its way.Both verses use the same Hebrew root for “perish,” which also means “be lost.” Psalm 1 places that loss on a way, making the burned vine here read as more than physical destruction: its way forward has vanished.
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