What Does Matthew 19:8 Mean in the King James?
He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
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
A permitted release is named as a response to hardness, while the beginning remains the measure of the union.
THE MEANING
This verse holds two realities together: hardened hearts receive permission to dismiss a spouse, and that permission does not make dismissal the pattern from the beginning. It speaks now wherever a human allowance is mistaken for the deepest truth of a bond.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that because something is permitted, it must belong to the original design.
THE ROOT
σκληροκαρδία
sklērokardía
GROWS FROM
Greek compound: σκληρός (sklēros) + καρδία (kardía)
Hardness of heart; the compound joins “hard” and “heart.”
“hardness of your hearts” in this verse is sklērokardía. The phrase locates the concession in hardened hearts rather than in the creation pattern. The verse distinguishes what that hardness is permitted to do from what was true “from the beginning.”
ALSO GROWS
sklērótēs: hardness
σκληρότης
This related form names the quality of being hard, making the condition behind the concession explicit.
sklērýnō: to harden
σκληρύνω
The verb shows the same word family describing hardening as a process, not merely a fixed label.
kardía: heart
καρδία
This component identifies where the hardness is located: in the heart.
ἀπολῦσαι
apolýsai
GROWS FROM
λύω (lýō), “loosen” or “release,” in ἀπολύω (apolýō), “release” or “dismiss”
To release, dismiss, or send away; in this setting, to divorce.
“put away” in this verse is apolýsai. The verb names putting away as release or dismissal, and its ordinary range can include sending someone away. Here the permission to release sits beside the statement that this is not how it was from the beginning.
ALSO GROWS
lýō: to loosen or release
λύω
The base verb carries the sense of loosening that remains inside the word for dismissal.
apolýō: to release or dismiss
ἀπολύω
This is the verb family used for sending away, including the act named in this verse.
apólysis: release or dismissal
ἀπόλυσις
The related noun preserves the same release-and-dismissal language, bringing the act into view as a form of sending away.
THE PATTERN
An accommodation to human hardness can regulate rupture without making rupture the original design.
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.THE THREAD
And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.Mark uses the same Greek compound, σκληροκαρδία (sklērokardía, “hardness of heart”), linking the two statements at the root. It clarifies that the provision answers human hardness rather than describing the beginning’s pattern.
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