What Does 1 Timothy 5:3 Mean?
Give weight to the widows who truly are widows.
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
Honour widows that are widows indeed.THE KEY
The verse makes honor an act of valuation: widowhood does not erase a woman’s standing.
THE MEANING
A woman who is truly widowed remains within the community’s field of care. The verse gives her worth public weight; the loss of her husband does not make her invisible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
That losing a husband removes a woman’s standing or claim to the community’s regard.
THE ROOT
τιμάω
timaō
GROWS FROM
τιμ-
Value, price, or worth; as a verb, to value or honor.
“Give weight to” in this verse is timaō. The English “honour” can sound like polite recognition; τιμάω carries the sense of assigning someone worth. The verse gives a widow’s value public weight: her loss does not erase her standing in the community.
ALSO GROWS
timē: Value, price, honor
τιμή
This noun shares the verb’s root and shows that honoring begins with the value assigned to someone.
timios: Precious, valuable, costly
τίμιος
This branch shows what is treated as carrying worth and weight.
THE PATTERN
A community’s integrity is visible in whether people made vulnerable by loss remain within its care.
He executes judgment for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him bread and a cloak.Learn to do good. Seek justice, straighten the crushed, judge the fatherless, contend for the widow.Clean and unstained service before God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widowed in their being pressed, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.THE THREAD
For Moses said, Give weight to your father and your mother, and, Whoever speaks evil of father or mother, let him end in death.The same Greek verb, τιμάω (timaō), appears here as “Honour.” In Mark, the surrounding verses expose how a religious claim can leave parents without care, making the lived weight inside honor visible.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us