Selah, What does it mean?
Selah! There is a little word in the Bible that we have probably seen so many times that we hardly notice it anymore. Selah . It is sitting there in the Psalms, sometimes right in the middle of something David is saying, sometimes at the end of a thought, and three times it appears in Habakkuk 3 . Most of us have probably heard that Selah means “pause and think about it,” and that is not a bad way to approach what happens when we come to the word. But if we are going to really study it, we need to start by admitting something that makes this word much more interesting: we do not know exactly what the Hebrew word סֶלָה , selah , means. That may sound strange. There it is in Scripture, seventy-one times in the Psalms and three times in Habakkuk, and yet we cannot simply open a Hebrew dictionary and find one English word that settles the matter. The ancient translators did not completely agree about it either. The Septuagint uses the Gre...
