What Does 1 Thessalonians 5:7 Mean?
For those who sleep, sleep in the night, and those who get drunk, are drunk in the night.
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
For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night.THE KEY
Sleep and drunkenness are paired beneath the same night, but the next verse places you among those who belong to the day.
THE MEANING
Sleep is the body lying down; drunkenness clouds alertness. The verse places both in the familiar rhythm of night, while the surrounding words speak to you as someone called to stay awake and clear.
THE ROOT
κοιμάω
koimaō
GROWS FROM
κεῖμαι
keimai
to lie down, be laid
The Greek word for sleep carries the sense of lying down. Beside drunkenness, it makes night a shared setting for states in which alertness recedes; the next lines call you to wakefulness and sobriety.
ALSO GROWS
koimēsis: sleep, the act of sleeping
κοίμησις
It keeps the idea of sleep tied to the act of lying down.
koimētērion: sleeping place; later, cemetery
κοιμητήριον
The word for a place of burial preserves the image of being laid down to sleep.
μεθύω
methyō
GROWS FROM
μεθυ-
methu-
to be intoxicated
“those who get drunk” in this verse is methyō. The verse repeats “in the night” for both sleep and drunkenness, giving them one setting without making them the same state. That pairing prepares the contrast with the wakefulness and sobriety named in the surrounding passage.
ALSO GROWS
methē: drunkenness, intoxication
μέθη
It names the condition described by the verb in the verse.
methyskō: to make drunk, intoxicate
μεθύσκω
It shows the related action that brings about intoxication.
THE PATTERN
Darkness often becomes the setting where awareness dims or people seek cover for their conduct, while light exposes what is happening.
The eye of the adulterer watches for twilight, saying, "No eye will see me"; and he sets hiding over his face.And this is the sifting, that the light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil.Let us walk with good bearing, as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in bedding and unbridled acts, not in strife and boiling.THE THREAD
But we, who are of the day, let us be sober, putting on the breastplate of trust and love, and for a helmet, the hope of deliverance.The next verse turns the night’s ordinary pattern into a contrast: you are addressed as belonging to the day and called to sobriety. That shift makes verse 7 the backdrop for a different way of being present.
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