What Does Psalm 85:7 Mean?
Let us see your faithful love, LORD, and give us your deliverance.
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
Shew us thy mercy, O LORD, and grant us thy salvation.THE KEY
The prayer asks for God’s faithful love to become visible in the very act of bringing you out.
THE MEANING
You can name your need plainly, asking for faithful love to meet you and deliverance to be given. The verse holds both together: love is shown, and you are brought out.
THE ROOT
חֶסֶד
chesed
GROWS FROM
ח־ס־ד
To act with faithful kindness and loyal care.
Beneath “mercy” is חֶסֶד (chesed, faithful love): care that holds through the need, not only a passing feeling of pity. The prayer asks for that faithful love to be shown, to become visible here.
ALSO GROWS
hasad: To act with kindness or faithful care.
חָסַד
It gives the prayer’s “shew us” a lived quality: faithful love is something enacted and made visible.
chasid: A faithful or loyal one.
חָסִיד
This branch shows the relational shape of chesed: faithful love is known through loyalty.
יְשׁוּעָה
yeshuah
GROWS FROM
י־שׁ־ע
To deliver, bringing someone out from distress into safety and room.
“Salvation” here is יְשׁוּעָה (yeshuah, deliverance), from the same root as יָשַׁע (yasha, to deliver). The word carries movement out of constriction: deliverance is granted, received, and made real.
ALSO GROWS
yasha: To deliver or bring out.
יָשַׁע
The verb behind yeshuah makes clear that deliverance is an act of being brought out.
moshia: Deliverer; one who brings out.
מוֹשִׁיעַ
This branch places the focus on the one who gives the deliverance the prayer asks to receive.
THE PATTERN
Deliverance becomes visible through faithful care that turns toward people in need.
And the LORD passed by before his face, and called out, The LORD, The LORD God, compassionate and full of favor, slow to flare, abounding in faithful love and truth,Remember me, O LORD, with the favor you bear toward your people. Visit me with your deliverance.Through the inward faithful love of our God, in which the rising from on high has looked upon us,THE THREAD
O LORD, I beg you, deliver now. O LORD, I beg you, make now a way through.“Save now” is הוֹשִׁיעָה (hoshia, deliver), from the root י־שׁ־ע (yasha, to deliver), the same root as יְשׁוּעָה (yeshuah, deliverance) in this verse. Psalm 85 asks for deliverance to be granted; Psalm 118 makes the same cry immediate.
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