What Does 1 Corinthians 10:22 Mean?
Or do we stir the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
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
Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he?THE KEY
The Greek word-family joins jealousy with zeal, revealing the Lord’s jealousy as an active claim on allegiance rather than a passing mood.
THE MEANING
The question meets the reader wherever two allegiances seem compatible: the Lord’s claim is active, and the rival table is not neutral. The question about strength exposes how little human confidence can do to make that rivalry safe.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that a competing allegiance can be kept in place without consequence, as though human strength could control the conflict.
THE ROOT
παραζηλοῦμεν
parazēloumen
GROWS FROM
ζηλ-
zēl-
Ardent zeal, intense desire, or jealousy.
“provoke to jealousy” in this verse is parazēloumen. The Greek word-family holds zeal and jealousy together, showing the force of an attachment that will not treat rival allegiance as harmless. English can make “jealousy” sound like a passing feeling; here the word carries the weight of an active claim.
ALSO GROWS
zēlos: Zeal, ardor, or jealousy
ζῆλος
Its range shows that jealousy and ardent devotion belong to the same word-family.
zēloō: To be zealous, desire earnestly, or be jealous
ζηλόω
This related verb makes the shared force visible: intense desire can be devotion or jealousy, depending on what it meets.
THE PATTERN
Rival allegiance is not neutral before the Lord; it meets the force of a claim that cannot be outmatched.
You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them, for I, the LORD your God, am a zealous God, visiting the crookedness of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.They have set me burning with what is not God, and provoked me with their vapors. And I will set them burning with what is not a people; I will provoke them with a withered nation.You adulterers and adulteresses, have you not seen that the friendship of the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore desires to be a friend of the world stands as an enemy of God.THE THREAD
They have set me burning with what is not God, and provoked me with their vapors. And I will set them burning with what is not a people; I will provoke them with a withered nation.The Greek translation of Deuteronomy uses παραζηλόω (parazēloō, provoke to jealousy), the same verb family as the question here. That shared root makes the question an echo of the earlier line: rival allegiance provokes the Lord’s zeal, and the next question asks whether anyone can outmatch that claim.
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