What Does 1 Corinthians 5:9 Mean?
I wrote to you in a letter not to mix together with the traders of bodies.
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
I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:THE KEY
The word translated “company with” pictures association as mixing, so the verse draws a line around entanglement rather than mere proximity.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now to the difference between encountering people and mixing your life with a pattern. The Greek image behind “company with” is mingling, so the boundary concerns entanglement, not simple proximity.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse does not mean you must avoid every sexually immoral person; the next verse says that would require going out of the world.
THE ROOT
συναναμίγνυσθαι
sunanamignysthai
GROWS FROM
μίγνυμι
mignymi
To mix or mingle.
“mix together with” in this verse is sunanamignysthai. The Greek verb behind “company with” is built on the word for mixing, turning social association into an image of mingling. English can make the phrase sound like simple proximity; the root carries the sense of joining in a shared mixture.
ALSO GROWS
mignymi: To mix or mingle.
μίγνυμι
This basic verb supplies the image beneath the verse’s language of association.
sunanamignymi: To associate or mingle together.
συναναμίγνυμι
This compound form names the kind of shared association the verse places a boundary around.
THE PATTERN
Shared company shapes the direction of a life, so Scripture treats association as participation with consequences.
The one who walks with the wise becomes wise; the one who grazes beside the dull is broken.Do not wander; bad company rots good habits.And if anyone does not hear and respond to our word through this letter, mark that man, and do not mingle with him, so that he may turn inward.THE THREAD
Yet not altogether with the traders of bodies of this world, or with those who hold more, or with the snatchers, or with the servants of images, for then you would have to go out of the world.The next verse repeats the same Greek verb for “company with” and makes clear that it cannot mean total withdrawal from sexually immoral people in the world. The shared root shows the distinction: the concern is a particular kind of association, not mere human proximity.
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