What Does Luke 10:41 Mean?
And Jesus answered and said to her, Martha, Martha, you are divided and stirred into an uproar about many things.
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
And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:THE KEY
The word translated “troubled” carries the sense of an uproar: many concerns have become a clamor within you.
THE MEANING
Jesus sees how many concerns crowd your attention and stir you into inner commotion. The verse names that experience plainly, without reducing you to it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being troubled by many things means you are simply failing; Jesus names the turmoil with tenderness.
THE ROOT
θορυβάζῃ
thorybazē
GROWS FROM
θορυβ-
thoryb-
tumult, uproar, commotion
“stirred into an uproar” in this verse is thorybazē. The word translated “troubled” belongs to the same word family as “uproar” and “ado.” English can make the experience sound like quiet worry; the Greek also lets you hear the clamor that many concerns create within you.
ALSO GROWS
thorybos: tumult, uproar
θόρυβος
The shared stem gives “troubled” the sound of commotion, not just a list of concerns.
thorybeō: to make an uproar; to be in commotion
θορυβέω
This verb uses the same word family for the tumult Jesus names in Martha.
THE PATTERN
When care gathers into a clamor, scripture gives it somewhere to be placed beyond the self.
Therefore I say to you, do not be pulled apart over your living soul, over what you will eat or what you will drink, nor over your body, over what you will put on. Is not the living soul more than food, and the body more than clothing?throwing all your divided care upon him, for you matter to him.Throw your load upon the LORD, and he holds you. He does not give the aligned one to totter for the ages.THE THREAD
And when he had entered, he said to them, "Why make this uproar and weep? The child is not dead, but sleeps."“Ado” translates a verb from the same Greek word family as “troubled” here. The root lets you recognize the same tumult whether it fills a room with noise or crowds one person’s attention.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
You can read any verse this way in the app, keep it as a card, and send it on.
A Bible app where you send verses from your keyboard and in Messages, and every verse has a Deep Dive.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us