What Does Mark 12:20 Mean?
Now there were seven brothers, and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed.
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
Now there were seven brethren: and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed.THE KEY
The verse measures a life by what has been sown forward: the man dies, and no seed remains.
THE MEANING
The man dies without a descendant to carry his line forward. Death and the absence of seed arrive together, making continuity the pressure beneath this family story.
THE ROOT
σπέρμα
sperma
GROWS FROM
σπείρω
speirō
To sow or scatter seed.
Greek σπέρμα (sperma) means both seed and offspring, tying descendants to what is sown. The English “seed” holds that connection, but the Greek word family makes it especially clear: a line of descendants is what a life has sown forward.
ALSO GROWS
speirō: To sow or scatter seed.
σπείρω
The action of sowing reveals seed as what is placed forward to grow.
spora: The act of sowing, or what is sown.
σπορά
This related word keeps the action and its outcome in one family, linking descendants with what a life plants.
ἀφῆκεν
aphēken
GROWS FROM
ἀφίημι
aphiēmi
To let go, send away, or leave.
The KJV’s “left” is a form of ἀφίημι (aphiēmi), which can also mean to release or forgive. That wider range gives “left no seed” an added edge: the line names what is absent at the moment of letting go.
ALSO GROWS
aphesis: Release or remission, including the release of a debt.
ἄφεσις
This related noun makes audible the release contained in the verb translated “left.”
aphiēmi: To release, remit, or forgive.
ἀφίημι
The same verb family links leaving behind with letting go.
THE PATTERN
Seed is Scripture’s image for life carried forward beyond its present bearer.
And he led him outside, and said, Look up toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them. And he said to him, So will your seed be.Truly, truly, I say to you. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.Mindless one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies.THE THREAD
Teacher, Moses wrote to us, If a man's brother dies, and leaves his wife behind him, and leaves no children, that his brother should take his wife and raise up seed for his brother.Both verses turn on σπέρμα (sperma, seed or offspring): verse 19 names the seed the brother is to raise, and verse 20 says the first brother leaves none. The repeated word makes verse 20 the case that tests the continuity named in verse 19.
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