What Does 1 Timothy 2:15 Mean?
Yet she shall be delivered through the birthing of children, if they remain in trust and love and setting apart, with soundness.
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
Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.THE KEY
A singular “she” and a plural “they” sit in the same promise, linking deliverance through childbearing with a continuing practice shared across people.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks deliverance through childbearing and ties that passage to ongoing trust, faithful love, set-apartness, and sound judgment. It moves from the singular “she” to the plural “they,” holding this bodily passage within a continuing life shared by a group.
THE ROOT
σῴζω
sōzō
GROWS FROM
σωζ-
sōz-
Rescue, keep safe, bring through.
“delivered” in this verse is sōzō. The verb-family holds rescue and restoration in one word, so “saved” can carry the sense of being brought through toward wholeness. “Through childbearing” gives this deliverance a named, embodied passage.
ALSO GROWS
sōtēr: Deliverer
σωτήρ
The same word-family names the one who brings someone through, keeping the verse’s focus on deliverance.
sōtēria: Deliverance
σωτηρία
This noun makes explicit the rescue carried by the verb translated “saved” here.
τεκνογονία
teknogonia
GROWS FROM
γον- (gon-, related to γεν- [gen-])
Begetting, offspring, coming into being.
“birthing of children” in this verse is teknogonia. The Greek compound joins “child” with “begetting,” holding the arrival of offspring inside the word. It frames the passage as the embodied bringing forth of children, alongside a condition stated for “they” in continuing trust and love.
ALSO GROWS
gonos: Offspring, progeny, seed
γόνος
This branch names what is brought forth, making the life-bearing sense in “childbearing” visible.
goneus: Parent, begetter
γονεύς
This branch names the relation of begetting that is carried in the verse’s word for childbearing.
THE PATTERN
Across Scripture, childbirth is a passage where pain and the arrival of life meet.
To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your pain and your conceiving. In pain you shall bring forth children, and your reaching shall be toward your husband, and he shall rule over you.A woman, when she brings forth, has pain, because her hour has come. But when she has borne the child, she no longer remembers the pressure, for the joy that a human has been brought forth into the world.THE THREAD
And he said to her, Daughter, take heart. Your trust has delivered you. Go into wholeness.Luke 8:48 uses the same verb σῴζω (sōzō, rescue or restore to wholeness), rendered there as “made thee whole.” The shared root lets “saved” here carry the breadth of being brought through and restored, while this verse names childbearing as its passage.
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