What Does Jude 1:2 Mean?
Faithful love to you, and wholeness, and love, be multiplied.
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
Mercy unto you, and peace, and love, be multiplied.THE KEY
Mercy, wholeness, and love arrive as a single abundance that can multiply.
THE MEANING
You are addressed with a wish that mercy, wholeness, and love increase in your life. The final verb gathers all three into one movement toward abundance.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the assumption that these qualities come in a fixed, scarce measure: the sentence pictures them as able to multiply.
THE ROOT
πληθυνθείη
plēthyntheiē
GROWS FROM
πληθυν-
Greek verb stem
To increase or become many.
“multiplied” in this verse is plēthyntheiē. The verb gathers mercy, peace, and love into one requested increase. These qualities are pictured as multiplying into abundance.
ALSO GROWS
plēthynō: To increase or multiply.
πληθύνω
This is the verb’s dictionary form and carries the same image of increase.
plēthos: A multitude or great number.
πλῆθος
The related noun shows the verb’s movement toward many becoming a multitude.
εἰρήνη
eirēnē
GROWS FROM
εἰρην-
Greek word-family stem
Peace, concord, and wholeness.
The Greek word carries wholeness alongside peace. Jude’s wish is for that wholeness to increase, not merely for conflict to be absent.
ALSO GROWS
eirēneuō: To be at peace or live peaceably.
εἰρηνεύω
The related verb gives peace the shape of a lived condition.
eirēnopoios: A peacemaker.
εἰρηνοποιός
This word shows the same family reaching into the making of peace.
ἀγάπη
agapē
GROWS FROM
ἀγαπ-
Greek word-family stem
Love or affection directed toward another.
The word-family includes both loving and being beloved, so love here is relational. It stands beside mercy and wholeness as something the verse asks to grow.
ALSO GROWS
agapaō: To love.
ἀγαπάω
The verb gives the noun a living expression in the act of loving.
agapētos: Beloved or dearly loved.
ἀγαπητός
This related word shows the same family from the side of the one receiving love.
THE PATTERN
The qualities given by God are pictured as increasing and filling human life.
Favor and wholeness be multiplied to you through the full knowing of God and of Jesus our Lord.The LORD adds upon you, upon you and upon your children.And hope does not put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Set-Apart Breath, which has been given to us.THE THREAD
And in those days, when the disciples multiplied, a grumbling of the Greek-speakers against the Hebrews arose, because their widows were overlooked in the daily serving.The verb Jude uses for mercy, peace, and love to be multiplied is the same Greek verb used here for the disciples’ number increasing. That shared root makes multiplication concrete as growth within a community, while the verse places that growth beside the widows’ neglect.
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