At Pentecost, Peter stood before a crowd in Jerusalem and quoted Psalm 16: “you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption.” Then he said, David “both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29). David’s body had seen corruption. The psalm, Peter argued, must be about someone else. Paul makes the same argument in Acts 13.

The argument rests on one Hebrew word, shakhat (שָֽׁחַת), and most modern dictionaries define it differently. In many places it means “pit”: a hole in the ground. Sometimes it is translated as “grave.” Read that way, Psalm 16:10 says only that God will keep the psalmist out of the grave. The idea of bodily decay disappears.

So where did “corruption” come from? From the Septuagint, the Greek translation made centuries before Peter, which rendered the word with a term meaning decay. The question is whether those translators got it right.

There is a good case that they did. Hebrew may have had two words that sounded and were spelled identical: shakhat, “pit,” from a root meaning to sink down, and shakhat, “corruption,” from a root meaning to ruin (shkt שׁכת). Job seems to use the second when he says, “If I say to corruption, ‘You are my father’” (Job 17:14, NIV). In Hebrew, “pit” is a feminine word. The word Job calls “father” is masculine.

The verb matters too. Psalm 16:10 says, literally, that God will not let his loyal one see shakhat. Hebrew writers use “see” to mean experiencing states: death, trouble, sorrow. They don’t “see” places when they experience them; they go down to them. People go down to the pit. They see decay. As Bruce Waltke puts it, “the ancient versions, not modern lexicographers, have the better of the argument.” In this case, “decay” appears to be an intensified poetic image for “death.” 

David’s tomb was still standing when Peter spoke. And the people knew that. That was the point.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → Psalm 16 Verse by Verse