What Does 1 Peter 4:9 Mean?
Welcome strangers among one another, without muttering.
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
Use hospitality one to another without grudging.THE KEY
The word translated “hospitality” names love directed toward the stranger, making welcome a visible form of love.
THE MEANING
The stranger who enters your space meets an act the verse calls love. Yet someone can be received outwardly while a murmur of resentment makes the welcome reluctant; the verse names both the open door and its tone.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
I can call resentment harmless as long as I still let someone in.
THE ROOT
φιλόξενοι
philoxenoi
GROWS FROM
ξεν- (xen-), from ξένος (xenos)
stranger, guest, or foreigner
“welcome strangers” in this verse is philoxenoi. Philoxenoi joins love or friendship (philos) with stranger (xenos): hospitality is, at its root, love turned toward the unfamiliar person. The word carries more than courteous hosting; it reveals the stranger as the very person toward whom this love is directed.
ALSO GROWS
xenos: stranger, guest, or foreigner
ξένος
This is the person named inside hospitality: someone outside the circle of familiarity.
xenizō: receive or entertain as a guest
ξενίζω
This verb makes the root’s welcome concrete: the stranger is received into one’s space.
philoxenia: love of strangers; hospitality
φιλοξενία
This related noun names the same love and appears in the call to continue in hospitality in Romans 12:13.
γογγυσμοῦ
gongysmou
GROWS FROM
γογγυσ-
gongys-
murmuring or grumbling
“muttering” in this verse is gongysmou. The Greek word points to a murmur, a complaint that can escape under the breath, rather than only a private feeling of reluctance. The verse holds the welcome and its sound together: the stranger may be admitted while the mutter reveals that the reception is unwilling.
ALSO GROWS
gongyzō: murmur or grumble
γογγύζω
This verb describes the complaint that the verse excludes from the act of receiving.
gongystēs: murmurer or grumbler
γογγυστής
This related noun names a person by the grumbling that marks their speech.
THE PATTERN
Scripture makes love of the stranger visible in welcome and tests that welcome by its tone.
But the sojourner who sojourns with you shall be to you as one who springs up among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.For I hungered, and you gave me food; I thirsted, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you gathered me in.Share in common the needs of the set apart. Pursue the love of strangers.THE THREAD
Do not let slip the opening of your home to strangers, for by it some have sheltered messengers without knowing it.The Greek for “entertain strangers” shares the ξεν- root carried in “hospitality” here. Hebrews opens the word further: the stranger welcomed may hold a presence the host does not yet recognize.
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