What Does Ephesians 6:2 Mean?
Give weight to your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise.
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 thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;)THE KEY
The word translated “honour” carries the sense of assigning worth, and this command joins that recognition to a promise.
THE MEANING
This command gives your father and mother a place of recognized worth in your life, and it carries a promise with it. The following line names that promise as life going well and length of days.
THE ROOT
τιμάω
timaō
GROWS FROM
τιμ-
tim-
Worth, value, or price.
“Give weight to” in this verse is timaō. The Greek word for honor grows from a word for value or worth. Its family includes words for what is precious, so the command carries a recognition of your parents’ worth alongside the respect their role receives.
ALSO GROWS
timē: Value, worth, price, or honor.
τιμή
This noun makes clear that honoring involves recognizing worth, not only using a respectful title.
timios: Precious, valuable, or held in honor.
τίμιος
This branch describes what is treated as precious, bringing the command’s language of honor close to the language of value.
THE PATTERN
Honor takes form as recognizing due worth across relationships and roles.
Give weight to your father and your mother, that your days may lengthen upon the ground which the LORD your God gives you.Honor all people. Love the brothers. Stand in awe of God. Honor the king.Let the elders who stand well at the front be weighed worthy of double honor, especially those who toil in the word and in teaching.THE THREAD
Therefore give back to all what is owed; the carried to whom the carrying is owed, the toll to whom the toll is owed, the trembling to whom trembling is owed, the weight to whom weight is owed.Here τιμή (timē, value or honor) appears again in the phrase “honour to whom honour.” The shared root opens honor as recognition of what is due, extending the command about parents into a wider way of seeing human worth.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
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