What Does Ezekiel 18:11 Mean?
who does none of these, but has eaten upon the mountains, and has defiled his neighbor's wife,
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
And that doeth not any of those duties, but even hath eaten upon the mountains, and defiled his neighbour’s wife,THE KEY
The verse treats adultery as an act that contaminates a shared bond, not as an appetite contained within one person.
THE MEANING
The verse names a contradiction: a person does none of the acts of justice listed before, yet violates a neighbor’s marriage. It calls this act defilement, making visible that the harm reaches beyond private desire to another person’s bond.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that sexual betrayal is private because desire is personal; the verse names the neighbor and the violated bond as part of the act.
THE ROOT
טִמֵּא
timmēʾ
GROWS FROM
טמא
To be unclean or to make unclean; to become contaminated.
The Hebrew word translated “defiled” belongs to the same word family as “unclean” and “uncleanness.” That shared root lets the verse name the act and the resulting condition together: the violation crosses a boundary and marks the bond it touches.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāmēʾ: Unclean
טָמֵא
This form names the state associated with the defilement in the verse.
ṭumʾāh: Uncleanness
טֻמְאָה
This noun shows that the same root can name the condition, not only the act of making something unclean.
THE PATTERN
A person’s desire is measured by whether it honors a neighbor’s marital bond.
and has not eaten upon the mountains, nor lifted up his eyes to the dung idols of the house of Israel, nor defiled his neighbor's wife, nor drawn near to a woman in her separation,You shall not commit adultery.But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to crave her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.THE THREAD
and has not eaten upon the mountains, nor lifted up his eyes to the dung idols of the house of Israel, nor defiled his neighbor's wife, nor drawn near to a woman in her separation,The same Hebrew root, טמא, appears in both verses: here the person “hath not defiled,” while Ezekiel 18:11 names the defilement directly. The repeated word makes this boundary part of the text’s measure of integrity, rather than a passing detail.
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