What Does 1 Corinthians 8:13 Mean?
Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will eat no flesh while the age stands, lest I make my brother stumble.
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
Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.THE KEY
“Offend” carries the image of setting a stumbling block in another person’s path, so the verse frames restraint as refusing to become the cause of someone else’s fall.
THE MEANING
A permitted choice can still become a tripwire in someone else’s path. Your freedom remains real, yet you can release its exercise so another person is not pulled into a fall. The repeated verb connects your brother’s stumbling with your refusal to cause it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a choice is harmless simply because it is permitted dissolves here: its effect on another person matters too.
THE ROOT
σκανδαλίζω
skandalizō
GROWS FROM
σκανδαλ-
skandal-
A snare or stumbling block set in another’s path.
Here “offend” carries the image of making someone stumble, not merely bruising their feelings. The verb repeats for both the brother’s stumbling and Paul’s refusal, binding the exercise of freedom to whether it trips another person.
ALSO GROWS
skándalon: A snare or stumbling block.
σκάνδαλον
This noun makes the hidden image concrete: what causes the stumble is pictured as an obstacle in the path.
skandalismós: A stumbling or occasion of stumbling.
σκανδαλισμός
This related noun names the result or occasion of the stumble, showing how an action can become a cause of another’s fall.
THE PATTERN
A person’s freedom is measured by whether it becomes a stumbling block in another’s path.
You shall not curse the deaf, nor set a stumbling block before the blind; but you shall stand in awe of your God. I am the LORD.It is better for him if a millstone is hung around his neck and he is cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble.It is good not to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor to do anything by which your brother's foot strikes, or is snared, or is made weak.THE THREAD
But whoever causes one of these little ones who lean their weight into me to stumble, it is better for him that a donkey's millstone be hung about his neck, and that he be sunk down into the deep of the sea.The Greek verb σκανδαλίζω (skandalizō, “cause to stumble”) appears in both verses. Jesus names the gravity of causing a little one to fall; here Paul responds by refusing even an ordinary freedom if it would make him that cause.
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