What Does 1 Corinthians 5:8 Mean?
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of badness and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of clarity and truth.
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
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.THE KEY
A little leaven never stays in one corner of the loaf; the feast takes on whatever is working through it.
THE MEANING
You are living inside a feast shaped by what is mixed through it: malice and wickedness spread like leaven, while sincerity and truth are the unleavened bread. What works through the shared life shapes the whole.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a little malice stays private or harmless: what is mixed into the shared life works its way through the whole.
THE ROOT
ζύμη
zymē
GROWS FROM
ζυμ-
zym-
Leavening; fermenting
The Greek puts “leaven” and “unleavened” in one word-family: ἄζυμος (azymos) is bread without the leaven. The contrast is about what is mixed into the loaf, because a little leaven works through the whole mass.
ALSO GROWS
azymos: Bread made without leaven.
ἄζυμος
It shares the leaven’s word-family while naming its absence, making the verse’s contrast a matter of what is present in the bread.
zymoō: To cause something to rise or ferment through leaven.
ζυμόω
It names the spreading action behind the image: leaven changes the mass it enters.
THE PATTERN
Whatever is mixed into a whole works its way through the whole.
Seven days you will eat unrisen bread. But on the first day you will make the leaven cease from your houses, for whoever eats risen bread from the first day until the seventh day, that living soul will be cut off from Israel.It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until the whole was leavened.A little leaven leavens the whole kneaded mass.THE THREAD
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?The same Greek word-family makes leaven’s action explicit: even a little works through the whole mass. This verse names what is working through the feast, malice and wickedness, or sincerity and truth.
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