Two ancient poems describe what happens inside the womb—at a time when no human being could see inside one. Here’s what they actually say, word by word, and how close they come to what embryology has since discovered.
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Psalm 139:13–16 and Job 10:8–11 describe life in the womb as a hidden, gradual, ordered process. Something shapeless is woven, layer by layer, into a body. Modern embryology describes the same process: an undifferentiated cluster of cells becomes an organised human body through layering, migration and interlacing. Both texts are poems, not medical reports, and we shouldn’t claim more precision than they have. But they get the direction of travel right at a time when the womb was completely closed to human eyes—and when every rival theory of how babies are made got it wrong.
For almost all of human history, the womb was a locked room. Nobody could look inside it. There were no scanners, no microscopes, no cameras. A woman knew she was pregnant because her body changed, and because months later she felt movement. What happened in between was a complete mystery. Even the best-trained doctors of the ancient world were guessing—and, as we shall see, guessing wrongly.
That’s what makes the two Old Testament passages so striking. Psalm 139 and Job 10 describe what God does inside the womb. Neither writer could check his work. Neither had any way of knowing whether he was right. And yet they describe a shapeless substance that is worked on, wrapped, woven and clothed until it becomes a body.
Psalm 139 is a song of worship and Job 10 is the complaint of a suffering man. Both are poetry. But poetry can still be true about the world it describes. If an ancient poem said babies were carved out of stone, we’d rightly say the poem got the details wrong. So here’s the question we’re asking: when these writers pictured the womb, did they get the shape of the process right? The answer is yes—remarkably so. And one further verse, Ecclesiastes 11:5, makes the point sharper still, because it openly admits nobody in Israel understood how any of this worked.
Here’s a quick overview. We will then take each text slowly, explain the Hebrew words behind the English, set out honestly where the evidence is strong and where it’s not, and finish with what this means for how we see human life—including our own.
Table 1: What the texts say, and where embryology lines up
| VERSE | WHAT THE TEXT SAYS | WHAT DEVELOPMENT ACTUALLY INVOLVES |
|---|---|---|
| Psalm 139:13 | “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb” | Body parts form by interlacing, not assembly: nerves, blood vessels, muscle fibres and collagen weave through one another. |
| Psalm 139:15 | “Intricately woven in the depths of the earth” | The whole process happens in a place hidden from every human eye. The Hebrew word is the one used for skilled embroidery. |
| Psalm 139:16 | “Your eyes saw my unformed substance” (golem) | Before any organ exists, the embryo is a small, compact, not-yet-differentiated mass of cells. |
| Job 10:10 | “Poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese” | A fluid, flowing beginning that thickens and takes solid shape. A change of state, not an instant arrival. |
| Job 10:11 | “Clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews” | Soft tissue is in place well before the skeleton hardens. Bone forms late—and keeps “knitting” for years after birth. |
| Ecclesiastes 11:5 | “You do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones” | An open admission that the process was beyond anyone’s knowledge—which makes the imagery above more surprising, not less. |
Psalm 139:13–16: Four Words Worth Slowing Down For
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:13–16)
Read quickly, this sounds like ordinary religious language. Read slowly, four expressions stand out. Each one is doing more work than it first appears.
1. “You formed my inward parts”
The Hebrew literally says God created the psalmist’s kidneys. In Hebrew, the kidneys stand for the innermost self—the private centre of a person, where conscience and deep feeling live. English does the same thing when it speaks of a decision coming from the heart. Nobody thinks the organ that pumps blood is making decisions.
This matters for our whole argument, so it’s worth saying early: the Bible often describes the body the way ordinary people experience it, not the way an anatomist would chart it. That’s not an error. It’s normal human speech.
2. “You knitted me together”
The Hebrew verb here is sakak. It carries two related ideas: to cover or screen something, and to weave or interlace. That is why translations differ. The King James Version has “covered me”; the New International Version and New American Standard have “wove me together”; the ESV has “knitted me together.”
Scholars genuinely debate which sense is uppermost here. But notice both senses point the same way. Whether the picture is protective covering or interlacing threads, it’s not the picture of a finished object being placed in a container. It’s the picture of something being made by a process—slowly, from the inside, by hands that work with fibres.
WHY “WEAVING” ISN’T JUST A PRETTY WORD
Weaving isn’t a decorative image for how bodies are built. It’s close to a literal description of what happens.
Nerve cells travel long distances through the developing embryo and thread themselves between other tissues to reach their targets.
Blood vessels form as fine networks that branch and interlace through every tissue, rather than being laid down as finished pipes.
Collagen—the main structural protein of the body—is literally laid down in interlocking fibres, like the warp and weft of cloth.
Heart muscle is arranged in spiralling, interwoven bands, which is why the heart wrings rather than simply squeezes.
An ancient poet reaching for the language of the loom picked, by any measure, an unusually good metaphor.
3. “Intricately woven in the depths of the earth”
Here the Hebrew uses a different and more specialised word: raqam. It’s the word for embroidery—skilled needlework in coloured thread. It’s used in Exodus of the craftsmen who embroidered the curtains and the screen of the tabernacle, God’s dwelling place. That’s a deliberate and rather stunning echo. The care that went into the sanctuary echoes the care that goes into the making of a human body.
“In the depths of the earth” isn’t a claim that babies are formed underground. It’s a poetic way of saying “in the deepest hidden place there is.” Commentators also hear an echo of Genesis 2:7, where the first man is formed from the dust of the ground. Every person made in the womb is being connected, by that phrase, to the making of Adam. The point of the image is secrecy and depth: this happens where nobody can watch.
4. “Your eyes saw my unformed substance”
This is the most remarkable phrase in the passage. The Hebrew word is golem, and it appears nowhere else in the entire Old Testament.
Word study: golem (Psalm 139:16)
How often it appears: Once. This single verse is the only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible.
Its root: The verb galam means to roll up or fold up. It’s used in 2 Kings 2:8, where Elijah rolls up his cloak and strikes the water of the Jordan.
So the sense is: Something rolled together, folded, compacted—raw material that hasn’t yet been given its final shape.
In later Hebrew: The word came to mean an unfinished object—for example a vessel that has been shaped but not completed.
How translations render it: “Unformed substance” (ESV), “unformed body” (NIV), “substance, yet being unperfect” (KJV).
The idea is not a small baby. The idea is a compacted, undifferentiated something that God is looking at before it has any recognisable form at all.
Compare that with what embryology now describes. In the first days after conception, the new human being is a compact ball of cells with no organs, no limbs and no visible shape—first a solid cluster, then a hollow sphere. Only in the third week does the process called gastrulation sort those cells into three layers, from which every tissue of the body will come. Organs form mainly between weeks three and eight. Before that stage, “unformed substance” is about as accurate a two-word description as ordinary language can manage.
Now consider how counter-intuitive that is. Left to guesswork, what would an ancient person assume was in the womb? Almost certainly a miniature but complete child, growing larger month by month. That’s exactly what educated Europeans believed for centuries. In 1694 Dutch scientist Nicolaas Hartsoeker published a famous sketch of a fully formed tiny human curled up inside a sperm cell. The theory was called preformationism, and it dominated respectable science well into the 18th century. It was only challenged seriously by Caspar Friedrich Wolff in 1759, and only settled after Karl Ernst von Baer identified the mammalian egg in 1827.
In other words, the guess that Psalm 139 doesn’t make is precisely the guess that trained scientists were still making 2,700 years later.
Job 10:8–11: A Suffering Man Retraces His Own Making
Your hands fashioned and made me, and now you have destroyed me altogether. Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. (Job 10:8–11, ESV)
Job isn’t writing a lecture. He’s arguing with God. His logic is this: you took enormous trouble to make me, so why are you now undoing me? But in making the argument, he retraces the stages of his own formation—and the sequence he gives is worth examining.
- Fashioned and made: The first verb suggests shaping by hand, like a craftsman. The picture is deliberate work, not an accident.
- Like clay, returning to dust: Again the Genesis 2 echo. Human beings are worked material, not self-assembled.
- Poured out like milk, curdled like cheese: A liquid beginning that thickens into solid form. Whatever ancient understanding lies behind the image, the concept it carries is a change of state—from flowing to firm.
- Clothed with skin and flesh: Covering comes into the account before the skeleton does.
- Knit together with bones and sinews: The same verb as Psalm 139:13—sakak. Bones and sinews are described as being woven through what’s already there.
That last ordering is the interesting part. If you were inventing a description of how a body is built, you’d almost certainly start with the skeleton. That’s how a person builds a statue, a house or a scarecrow: frame first, covering last. Job reverses it. Skin and flesh are named first, and the bones are knit through afterwards.
Development actually runs close to Job’s order. In the 3rd week the embryo separates into 3 layers, and the outermost of these begins forming the skin and nervous system very early. The skeleton is a latecomer: bones begin as soft cartilage models, and hardening only starts around the 7th or 8th week. It carries on for years—a newborn baby’s skull is still famously unfinished, with soft spots that close over months, and some bones don’t fully harden until we’re in our 20s. The knitting continues long after birth.
A TELLING CONTRAST: JOB 10 AND EZEKIEL 37
Sceptics sometimes suggest the Bible is simply repeating one stock formula about bodies. It’s not. Compare two passages that describe two completely different things.
Ezekiel 37:6–8 (a valley of dry bones): sinews, then flesh, then skin—laid onto bones that are already there. This is rebuilding a body around an existing skeleton, and the order fits that exactly.
Job 10:11 (formation in the womb): skin and flesh first, with bones and sinews knit through afterwards. This is building a body from nothing, and the order fits that.
The two texts move in opposite directions because they’re describing opposite processes. That’s a sign of careful writing, not of a formula being repeated.
WHAT THE ANCIENT WORLD ACTUALLY THOUGHT
It’s worth remembering what the alternatives looked like.
Aristotle (4th century BC): taught in his Generation of Animals that the male seed supplied the form and the mother supplied the material, and that the heart was the first organ to appear. His system shaped medicine for nearly 2000 years.
Egyptian medical papyri: are detailed on many diseases and remedies but say very little about how a child is actually formed.
European science until the 1700s: largely held that a complete miniature person was already present and merely had to expand.
Set against that background, an image of unformed material being woven into a body in stages isn’t the obvious thing for an ancient writer to say.
Ecclesiastes 11:5: The Bible Admits Nobody Knew
As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. (Ecclesiastes 11:5, ESV)
The Hebrew word translated “spirit” here is ruach, which can mean wind, breath or spirit. Because of that, some translations read the verse as being about the path of the wind, and others about the coming of the breath of life into the unborn child. The ESV itself notes the alternative. We don’t need to settle that debate to see the point the Preacher is making, because it’s the same either way: there are ordinary processes going on all around us that we don’t understand, and the making of a child in the womb is the clearest example.
His practical conclusion follows immediately: get on with sowing your seed and doing your work, and leave the outcome with God. Ignorance isn’t a reason for paralysis.
The Old Testament states plainly this process was beyond human understanding. And that’s exactly what makes Psalm 139 and Job 10 more interesting, not less.
Think about how invented “science” normally behaves in ancient texts. It explains. It offers a mechanism. It tells you which organ comes first and what substance forms what. The biblical writers do none of that. They confess they don’t know how it works—and then describe what’s happening in images of hiddenness, weaving and staged formation that turn out to fit the process well. Confession of ignorance plus accurate imagery is a very unusual combination.
Honest Limits: What We Are and Aren’t Claiming
A case is only watertight if it doesn’t leak at the edges. So let’s state the limits plainly.
Table 2: Drawing the line clearly
| WHAT WE AREN’T CLAIMING | WHAT WE ARE CLAIMING |
|---|---|
| That Psalm 139 is a clinical description of embryonic development. | That it is a poem which nevertheless pictures development as hidden, gradual and ordered—which it is. |
| That golem is a technical term for the blastocyst or the embryo before organs form | That golem describes unformed, compacted material, and that there genuinely is such a stage. |
| That the Hebrew is beyond dispute. Sakak can mean cover as well as weave. | That every serious reading of the word points to process and craftsmanship, not to instant arrival. |
| That Job 10:11 gives a strict chronological sequence. Hebrew poetry uses parallelism, and word order can be rhetorical. | That the order Job gives runs against the intuitive one, and lands closer to the actual sequence. |
| That these verses on their own prove the Bible is inspired. | That they are consistent with inspiration, and are hard to explain as lucky ancient guesswork. |
| That the main purpose of these texts is scientific. | That their main purpose is theological—and that the theology is what we should be taking home. |
THE HONEST SUMMARY
The strength of the case doesn’t rest on any single word. It rests on the trajectory. Three separate biblical writers, across three different kinds of literature, describe formation in the womb as a hidden, gradual, ordered process worked by God. They did so at a time when the womb was completely opaque to observation and when every competing account of human origins in the ancient world was substantially wrong. They don’t explain the mechanism. They never claim to. But they get the shape of the process right, and they never get it embarrassingly wrong. That’s the claim.
The Point of It All: A Person, Not a Process
Everything above is preliminary. Psalm 139 wasn’t written to win an argument about embryology. It was written to worship. So what’s the theological payoff?
The unformed thing is called “me”
Notice the pronouns. “You formed my inward parts.” “You knit me together.” “Your eyes saw my unformed substance.” David doesn’t say God made something which later became him. He says God made him. The golem isn’t an “it” that turns into a “me” at some later date. From the very first line of the account, the language is personal and continuous.
This is the quiet foundation of the Christian view of human worth. Personhood isn’t something we achieve by reaching a certain size, or a certain level of function, or a certain stage of visible development. It’s conferred by God, who’s already relating personally to the unformed substance He is at work on. John Wyatt, a neonatal paediatrician, who spent his career caring for the smallest and sickest of newborns, has argued this point at length: a human being is never merely a potential person, but a person with potential—and, in his memorable phrase, a flawed masterpiece.
God works through the process, not around it
Some Christians assume that if embryology can describe how a body forms, God is left with nothing to do. That’s a mistake.
Vern Poythress, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard and teaches at Westminster Theological Seminary, opens his book Redeeming Science with a deliberately provocative claim: “all scientists—including agnostics and atheists—believe in God.” They must, he argues, in order to do their work at all. Every scientist depends in practice on the regularity of nature, and on Poythress’s account those regularities aren’t impersonal machinery. They’re the personal, providential speech of God upholding the world—moment by moment.
On that view, “God knitted me together” and “cells migrated, layered and differentiated” aren’t two rival answers to one question. They’re an answer to two different questions. The second describes the ordinary means. The first names the One who’s working through them. This is simply the doctrine of providence applied to a womb. The Belgic Confession speaks of God upholding and governing all things; the Heidelberg Catechism says that leaf and blade, rain and drought, come to us not by chance but from a Father’s hand. So does an embryo.
Known before we existed
The last line of the passage moves from formation to providence: “in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” God’s involvement isn’t limited to the moment of assembly. He was already committed to the whole life. Jeremiah hears the same thing said to him: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). Paul says God set him apart before he was born (Galatians 1:15).
This is deeply comforting. It means no life is accidental. It means the person who feels unwanted was wanted before he existed. It means the God who is nearest to us in our weakest, most invisible, least impressive condition—when we were literally shapeless—hasn’t changed his mind about us since.
And what it means for the living
If this is how God relates to human beings at their smallest, it shapes how we treat them at every stage. Our site addresses the bioethical questions—abortion, IVF, embryo selection, prenatal screening—in their own posts, and this isn’t the place to re-argue them. But it’s worth saying the argument in those posts stands on the ground we have covered here. A human being isn’t raw material. A human being is someone God is already making.
It also shapes how we see ourselves. Verse 14 is the response David actually gives: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Not “I conclude that,” but “I praise you.” The right response to embryology, for a believer, isn’t merely to win a debate. It’s worship.
Conclusion
A man 3000 years ago, who couldn’t have seen a cell, insisted God saw him when he was unformed substance and wove him together in a hidden place. Another man, sitting in ashes and arguing with God, said he was poured out like milk, thickened, clothed with skin, and had his bones knit through him. A third writer admitted openly nobody understood any of it.
None of them was doing science. All of them were doing theology. And when we finally opened the locked room—with microscopes, with imaging, with the whole apparatus of modern embryology—we found a hidden, gradual, ordered weaving, from unformed material to a finished body, exactly the sort of thing the three men had described.
That doesn’t prove Christianity. But it should give the sceptic pause, and it should give the believer confidence: the Bible describes reality accurately even where its writers had no way of checking. And it should give all of us a settled sense of our own worth. Before anyone knew we existed—before we had a shape—we were seen. And known. And worked on with care.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
Does Psalm 139 prove the soul is present from the moment of conception?
It points strongly in that direction, but it doesn’t settle the mechanics. The psalm speaks of God forming the psalmist’s inward parts and seeing him as unformed substance, using personal language throughout. There’s no point in the account where an “it” becomes a “him.” Theologians have historically disagreed about how the soul comes to be: traducianism holds the soul is transmitted from the parents along with the body, while creationism holds God creates each soul directly. Herman Bavinck, who surveyed the question carefully in his Reformed Dogmatics, held neither view can be proved conclusively from Scripture and that each guards something important. What Scripture does affirm plainly is that the person exists and is known by God from the beginning. Where the Bible is quiet, we should be quiet too—but where it speaks, it speaks personally.
If the Bible is accurate here, why does it elsewhere say people think with their kidneys and hearts?
Because it’s speaking the way people ordinarily speak, and that isn’t an error. English does exactly the same thing: we say the sun rises, that someone broke our heart, or that we felt something in our gut. Nobody accuses a modern weather forecaster of ignorance for saying “sunrise.” This is called phenomenological language—describing the world as it is experienced rather than as it would be charted in a lab. Recognising this actually strengthens our argument rather than weakening it, because it keeps us from turning poetic images into technical claims they were never making. The remarkable thing about Psalm 139 and Job 10 isn’t that they use technical vocabulary. It’s that their ordinary, experiential language happens to fit the process well.
Identical twins split after conception. Doesn’t that undermine the idea of individual personhood from the start?
It’s a serious question. The objection assumes that if an entity can divide, it cannot have been a distinct individual beforehand. But that doesn’t follow: an organism can be a whole, integrated individual and still, under certain conditions, give rise to another. Nothing in the biblical texts requires that God’s creative work happens at only one instant—Psalm 139 describes an extended process of forming, weaving and clothing, not a single flash. On the Reformed view, God is equally the maker of both twins, and equally sovereign over the moment the division occurs. Practically, uncertainty about the metaphysics of twinning isn’t a licence to treat early human life carelessly; if anything, uncertainty argues for greater caution, not less.
If God knits every child together, why do so many pregnancies end in miscarriage?
This is the hardest question in the post. Scripture never promises God’s creative work in the womb guarantees a long life; Job’s whole complaint in Chapter 10 is precisely that the God who made him so carefully is now allowing him to be undone. We live in a world under the curse of Genesis 3, where death touches every stage of life, including the earliest. That doesn’t make a miscarried child less made, less known or less loved by God—Psalm 139 says God saw the unformed substance, and that seeing wasn’t cancelled by a short life. For parents who’ve lived through this, the comfort isn’t an explanation but a person: the God who was there in the hidden place hasn’t lost track of that child. Grief here isn’t a failure of faith. Jesus, after all, wept at a grave, too.
Other ancient cultures also spoke of gods forming babies. What makes the Bible different?
Egyptian texts do portray the god Khnum shaping children on a potter’s wheel, and forming imagery appears in several ancient cultures. The difference lies in the detail and the direction. Potter imagery pictures a shape being moulded from the outside; the biblical texts add weaving, layering, staged clothing and—uniquely—an unformed substance stage before any shape exists at all. The Bible also refuses to make the process a divine assembly line: the language is personal, covenantal and moral, tied to the worth and calling of the individual. Crucially, Ecclesiastes 11:5 does something the mythologies don’t do—it openly admits the process isn’t understood, rather than filling the gap with a story.
Does Psalm 139:16 mean every day of my life is fixed in advance?
The verse says the days formed for the psalmist were written in God’s book before any of them existed. God’s decree covers the whole of a life, not merely its beginning. As Ephesians 1:11 puts it, He works all things according to the counsel of His will. But this isn’t fatalism, and the difference matters. Fatalism says outcomes are fixed regardless of what we do; biblical doctrine says God ordains the means as well as the ends, so our prayers, choices and work are genuinely part of how His purpose comes about. The point of the verse in context isn’t calculation but comfort: nothing in our life will take God by surprise, because He wrote it before we drew breath.
Can someone who has had an abortion be forgiven?
Yes, fully and finally. The gospel isn’t a reward for people with clean records; it’s pardon for guilty people, purchased by the death of Christ. Scripture says the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin—not most sin, and not all sin except one. King David, who wrote Psalm 139, also arranged a man’s death and was forgiven and restored. The way forward isn’t to punish yourself, which achieves nothing, but to bring it honestly to God, who already knows it and has already provided for it. Speak to a faithful pastor. Guilt that drives us to Christ has done its work and should not be allowed to stay.
