What Does Luke 1:15 Mean?
For he will be great before the face of the LORD, and he will drink neither wine nor strong drink, and he will be filled with the Set-Apart Breath, even from his mother's womb.
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
For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb.THE KEY
The child’s greatness is seen by the Lord, and the Set-Apart Breath fills him from the womb, before he can prove anything.
THE MEANING
His abstaining from wine and strong drink marks a life set apart, while his greatness rests in the Lord’s sight. The verse places the Set-Apart Breath in him from the hidden beginning of the womb, before he can speak or act. It speaks now wherever life is still hidden: what the Lord sees is not measured by public recognition.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a life becomes significant only after it can act or earn recognition: here, greatness and the Breath’s filling are present before birth.
THE ROOT
πνεύματος ἁγίου
pneumatos hagiou
GROWS FROM
πνέω (pneō), the verb behind πνεῦμα (pneuma)
To breathe or blow; the movement of air as breath or wind.
“Set-Apart Breath” in this verse is pneumatos hagiou. English “Ghost” can obscure that πνεῦμα (pneuma, breath or wind) is the word here: the same Greek noun can name breath and wind as well as spirit. With ἅγιος (hagios, set apart), the phrase holds sacredness and breath together, the Breath fills John’s life from the womb.
ALSO GROWS
pneuma: Breath, wind, spirit.
πνεῦμα
This is the noun in the verse; its range lets “filled with the Holy Ghost” also carry the sense of being filled with the Set-Apart Breath.
pnoē: Breath, wind.
πνοή
This related word names the rushing wind in Acts 2:2, revealing the shared language of breath and moving air.
THE PATTERN
A life can be set apart and filled before its work or public recognition becomes visible.
But he said to me, Look, you will conceive and bear a son. And now drink no wine nor strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing, for the child shall be set apart to God from the womb to the day of his death.For you take hold of my kidneys; you weave me in my mother's womb.And they were all filled with the Set-Apart Breath, and began to speak in other tongues, as the breath gave them to speak out.THE THREAD
And they were all filled with the Set-Apart Breath, and began to speak in other tongues, as the breath gave them to speak out.Luke uses the same Greek pairing in both verses: πλησθήσεται (plēsthēsetai, “will be filled”) with πνεύματος ἁγίου (pneumatos hagiou, “Set-Apart Breath”). The phrase reaches from one life filled in the womb to a gathered company whose speech follows that filling.
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