What Does Exodus 20:14 Mean?
You shall not commit adultery.
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
Thou shalt not commit adultery.THE KEY
The command names a breach of fidelity with a Hebrew root Scripture also uses for covenant unfaithfulness.
THE MEANING
This boundary holds sexual fidelity as part of the trust shared between people. The Hebrew word reaches beyond a single act: its word family also describes covenant unfaithfulness, making betrayal a rupture of relationship.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that adultery is only a private act: the same Hebrew word can name covenantal unfaithfulness, so the breach carries relational meaning.
THE ROOT
תִּנְאָף
ti'naf
GROWS FROM
נ־א־ף
To commit adultery; to be sexually unfaithful.
The root נאף (na’aph, commit adultery) also describes unfaithfulness to a covenant. The word holds the act and its relational breach together, reaching beyond the narrower sense of a private sexual transgression.
ALSO GROWS
no'ef: An adulterer; one who commits adultery.
נֹאֵף
The person who commits the act is named from the same root, joining the actor to the breach.
ni'uf: Adultery; adulterous conduct.
נִאֻף
This noun carries the same root into a name for the act itself, keeping the focus on a breach of fidelity.
THE PATTERN
Fidelity is guarded as a bond of trust, and adultery is named as a breach that reaches beyond the act itself.
Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks heart; he who does it ruins his own living soul.Yet you say, "Why?" Because the LORD has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously. Yet she is the one joined to you, the wife of your covenant.You have heard that it was said to those of old, You shall not commit adultery.THE THREAD
Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks heart; he who does it ruins his own living soul.The verb “committeth adultery” grows from the same root, נאף (na’aph, commit adultery), as the command in Exodus. Proverbs traces the act into understanding and a person’s own life, showing that the breach reaches beyond outward appearance.
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