What Does Ephesians 5:28 Mean in the King James?
So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
Love begins with a debt: the beloved’s well-being belongs inside one’s own circle of bodily care.
THE MEANING
When a husband loves his wife as his own body, care for her is bound up with care for himself. The verse names that love as an owed, embodied relation.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a wife’s needs are separate from her husband’s own concern.
THE ROOT
ὀφείλουσιν
opheilousin
GROWS FROM
ὀφείλω
opheilō
To owe or be under obligation.
The word rendered “ought” also carries the sense of owing. Love here is more than a preference: the verse describes care as something owed within a bond where the other’s body is treated as one’s own.
ALSO GROWS
opheilē: Debt; obligation.
ὀφειλή
This related word makes the sense of love as something owed explicit.
opheiletēs: Debtor; one who owes.
ὀφειλέτης
The word for a debtor shows how the same root names the one who lives under an obligation.
ἀγαπᾶν
agapan
GROWS FROM
ἀγαπάω
agapaō
To love or cherish.
“love” in this verse is agapan. The verb appears again in the verse’s closing claim: the one loving his wife loves himself. Greek holds the act of loving and its effect on the self in one sentence, joined by the image of shared bodily care.
ALSO GROWS
agapē: Love.
ἀγάπη
The noun form carries the same family of love named here as an action.
agapētos: Beloved; dearly loved.
ἀγαπητός
This related word names the one who is loved, keeping the beloved within the same word family as the act of loving.
THE PATTERN
Where scripture names life as joined, another’s care or harm cannot be sealed off from one’s own.
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:THE THREAD
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;The same Greek verb for “love” anchors both verses. Here the measure is care for one’s own body; the connected verse gives that love a form in self-giving.
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