What Does John 3:4 Mean?
Nicodemus said to him, "How can someone be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother's womb a second time and be born?"
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
Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?THE KEY
Nicodemus turns “from above” into “a second time,” so a new source of life sounds like an impossible replay of the body’s first beginning.
THE MEANING
The possibility of a new beginning can be heard as a demand to repeat the old one. This question makes the image physical: a grown person cannot return to the womb. Its impossibility exposes how different a new birth’s source must be from the body’s first arrival.
THE ROOT
γεννηθῆναι
gennēthēnai
GROWS FROM
γεννάω (gennaō), γενν-
To beget or bring forth; γεννηθῆναι means “to be born.”
“born” in this verse is gennēthēnai. The Greek word belongs to a family that links birth with origin, offspring, and generation. The preceding word ἄνωθεν (anōthen, “from above” or “again”) supplies the hinge: Nicodemus hears a repeat, while the question of the verse is where this birth comes from.
ALSO GROWS
genesis: Birth, origin, beginning
γένεσις
It links being born with the source or beginning from which life comes.
genos: Kind, offspring, family
γένος
Birth brings someone into a kind or family, so it names belonging as well as an event.
genea: Generation, lineage
γενεά
The same word family connects one birth to a continuing line of life.
THE PATTERN
New birth names a new origin of life, not a second performance of the body’s first birth.
A new heart I will give you, and a new breath I will set within you. I will take the stone heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.Having been birthed again, not from seed that can be ruined but from what cannot be ruined, through the word of God, living and remaining for the ages.So if anyone is in the Anointed One, he is a new creation. What was old has passed by. Look, all things have become new.THE THREAD
Jesus answered and said to him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born from above, they cannot see the governance of God."Both verses use forms of γεννάω (gennaō, “beget” or “bring forth”). The word ἄνωθεν (anōthen, “from above” or “again”) in this verse’s preceding line opens two senses, and Nicodemus’s “second time” shows how the bodily reading takes hold.
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