What Does 1 Corinthians 15:39 Mean?
Not all flesh is the same flesh; but there is one flesh of humans, another flesh of the herd, another flesh of the winged, and another of fish.
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
All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.THE KEY
The same word “flesh” gathers humans, beasts, fish, and birds into one embodied world, while “another” keeps their forms distinct.
THE MEANING
Your embodied life belongs to the wider world of living flesh, yet it has a distinct form. Humans, beasts, fish, and birds share the word “flesh,” while each is called another. Shared embodiment does not make every body interchangeable.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that sharing the word “flesh” means every body is alike.
THE ROOT
σάρξ
sárx
GROWS FROM
σαρκ-
Flesh; bodily substance or embodied creatureliness.
The Greek repeats the same root for human, beast, fish, and bird flesh. The shared word gathers them into one field of embodiment, while the repeated “another” preserves their distinct forms.
ALSO GROWS
sarkinos: Made of flesh; fleshy.
σάρκινος
This branch makes the bodily substance explicit, illuminating the verse’s shared language for different creatures.
sarkikos: Fleshly; pertaining to flesh.
σαρκικός
This branch carries the same root into descriptions of what belongs to embodied, fleshly life.
ἄλλη
allē
GROWS FROM
ἀλλ-
Other; another, distinct from what has already been named.
The verse repeats this word as it moves from humans to beasts, fish, and birds. Difference is marked within the shared language of flesh: each is another form of embodied life.
ALSO GROWS
allotrios: Belonging to another; foreign.
ἀλλότριος
It carries the sense of what is other or belongs elsewhere, echoing the verse’s repeated distinctions.
allogenēs: Of another people or nation; foreign-born.
ἀλλογενής
This compound preserves the root’s sense of being other in origin, like the verse’s distinct creaturely forms.
THE PATTERN
Living creation shares embodied existence while taking distinct forms.
And God said, "Let the earth bring out living soul after its kind, cattle, creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind." And it was so.For what meets the children of humankind also meets the beast, and one encounter is theirs. As this one dies, so that one dies, and they all have one breath. Humankind has no remainder above the beast, for all is vapor.For every kind of beast, and of bird, and of creeping thing, and of what swims in the sea, is tamed, and has been tamed by humankind.THE THREAD
But this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the governance of God; neither does decay inherit what does not decay.The Greek root σαρκ- (sark-, “flesh”) returns here, paired with “blood,” to name mortal embodiment in contrast with inheriting incorruption. The following verses continue the question of how a body changes, opening the distinctions in verse 39 into a question of present and raised embodiment.
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