What Does 1 Corinthians 11:8 Mean?
For the man is not out of the woman, but the woman out of the man.
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
For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.THE KEY
The Greek word translated “of” means “out from”: it names the woman’s source, while the next verse traces all things to God.
THE MEANING
Your life is received through other lives; no human being is its first source. This origin sits within a larger pattern in which men and women depend on one another and all things come from God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that being another’s source makes someone greater or self-sufficient falls away: the next verse says the man also comes through woman, and all things are of God.
THE ROOT
ἐκ
ek
GROWS FROM
ἐκ
From, out of; marking source or origin.
“out of” in this verse is ek. In both “not of the woman” and “the woman of the man,” ἐκ (appearing as ἐξ before a vowel) marks where someone comes from. English “of” can hide this sense of origin: the verse describes a source, not by itself a measure of worth.
ALSO GROWS
ekballō: Cast or drive out.
ἐκβάλλω
This compound keeps ἐκ’s sense of movement outward, making the source-direction in the verse easier to hear.
ekporeuomai: Go out, proceed.
ἐκπορεύομαι
Here too, ἐκ marks movement from a point of origin, the same relation named in the verse.
THE PATTERN
Scripture traces human life through one another while tracing all things back to God.
And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from Adam, he built into a woman, and brought her to Adam.For as the woman is out of the man, so also is the man through the woman; but all things are out of God.For from him, and through him, and to him, are all things. To him let there be weight for the ages. Amen.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 same Greek preposition, ἐκ (“from, out of”), links the woman’s origin from the man with all things’ origin from God. The next clause completes the picture: the man also comes through the woman.
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