What Does 1 Corinthians 11:11 Mean?
Yet neither is the man apart from the woman, nor the woman apart from the man, in the Lord.
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
Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.THE KEY
In the Lord, neither man nor woman stands apart from the other; dependence runs both ways.
THE MEANING
You are met here as a person whose life is relational: in the Lord, neither man nor woman is imagined apart from the other. The verse gives that dependence in both directions, preserving distinction while refusing self-sufficiency.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie it undoes is that dependence runs only one way, that man can stand complete without woman, or woman without man. The sentence rejects both directions.
THE ROOT
χωρίς
chōris
GROWS FROM
χωρ-
chōr-
Apart, separated; the word carries a sense of being in a space apart.
The same word appears twice in the Greek, placing the two halves in exact reciprocity: neither woman apart from man, nor man apart from woman. “Without” here carries the sense of apartness, and the verse denies that either can stand apart in the Lord.
ALSO GROWS
chōrizō: To separate, divide, or put apart.
χωρίζω
This verb makes the word’s sense of separation concrete: chōris names the apartness that the verse denies in both directions.
chōra: Space, region, or country.
χώρα
Its spatial sense helps make chōris concrete as being apart; in the Lord, neither person occupies a separate, self-sufficient place.
THE PATTERN
Life in relation is reciprocal: distinction remains, but each depends on another.
Two are better than one, because they have good wages for their toil.So we, though many, are one body in the Anointed One, and each of us is a limb of one another.THE THREAD
For as the woman is out of the man, so also is the man through the woman; but all things are out of God.The next verse gives both directions: woman is of man, and man is by woman; then it gathers both into God. The reciprocity in verse 11 sits inside a wider claim of shared dependence.
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