What Does 1 Corinthians 15:55 Mean?
Where is your sting, death? Where is your victory, grave?
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
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?THE KEY
Death may still wound, but resurrection has taken from it the power to make the wound final.
THE MEANING
Death is real, but it does not hold the final victory over you. The verse confronts death’s power as something that can be challenged and overcome.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that because death can wound and bury, it must have the final word. The verse separates death’s real force from ultimate victory.
THE ROOT
κέντρον
kéntron
GROWS FROM
κεντ-
kent-
A sharp point: a sting, prick, or goad.
The word carries the image of a sharp point that wounds, and also of a goad that drives. The next verse names this sting as sin, revealing a specific piercing force behind death’s claim.
ALSO GROWS
kentrízō: To sting or prick.
κεντρίζω
This related verb makes the sharp image active: the sting is something that pierces, not just a vague pain.
kéntra: Pricks or goads; the plural form appears in Acts 26:14.
κέντρα
The goad can wound and drive at once, adding force to the image of what death’s sting does.
THE PATTERN
The powers that wound and hold the living do not get the final claim when God raises the dead.
From the hand of the grave I will ransom them; from death I will buy them back. Death, I will be your plague; grave, I will be your destruction. Relenting is hidden from my eyes.Jesus said to her, I am the rising, and the life. Whoever leans their weight into me, even if they die, will live.Knowing that the Anointed One, having been raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer masters him.THE THREAD
The sting of death is a shortcoming, and the strength of falling short is the instruction.The next verse repeats the same Greek word, κέντρον (kéntron), for “sting” and names what that piercing force is: sin. It opens the question here by showing that death’s sting is more specific than mortality’s pain.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us