What Does Mark 13:17 Mean?
But alas for those who carry a child in the belly, and for those who nurse in those days!
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
But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!THE KEY
The verse names catastrophe at its most bodily: it reaches both the body carrying a life and the body feeding one.
THE MEANING
When upheaval bears down, pregnancy and nursing make movement, shelter, and survival harder to secure; the verse names that bodily exposure directly. A life carried in the womb and a child dependent on milk are both placed within the crisis.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the belief that danger reaches every person on equal terms: pregnancy and nursing make escape and endurance differently constrained.
THE ROOT
ἐν γαστρὶ ἐχούσαις
en gastri echousais
GROWS FROM
γαστήρ (gastēr), stem γαστρ-
Belly; womb.
“carry a child in the belly” in this verse is en gastri echousais. The phrase is literally “having in the womb”: pregnancy appears as embodied carrying. In a verse about crisis, that wording keeps the life within the woman present in the sentence.
ALSO GROWS
gastēr: Belly, womb.
γαστήρ
The physical noun anchors the phrase in the body that carries a child.
en gastri echein: To have in the womb; to be pregnant.
ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχειν
This is the phrase’s literal structure: pregnancy is pictured as carrying life within.
θηλαζούσαις
thēlazousais
GROWS FROM
θηλ-
thēl-
Breast, nipple; the source of the verb meaning to suckle.
“nurse” in this verse is thēlazousais. The Greek verb names nursing at the breast. Beside pregnancy’s “having in the womb,” it makes the warning span carrying a life and sustaining one after birth.
ALSO GROWS
thēlē: Breast, nipple.
θηλή
This noun names the body part that gives the verb its physical image.
thēlazō: To suckle, nurse at the breast.
θηλάζω
The verb names the child’s bodily dependence on nursing.
THE PATTERN
Collective upheaval becomes concrete in the bodies carrying and sustaining dependent life.
And toward the afterbirth that comes out from between her feet, and toward her children whom she will bear, for she will eat them in the emptiness of all things, in hiding, in the siege and the pressing that your enemy will press upon you in your gates.And Hazael said, Why does my lord weep? And he answered, Because I perceive the evil you will do to the children of Israel. You will set their strongholds ablaze, slay their young men with the sword, dash their little ones, and split open their women heavy with child.When they say, "Wholeness and firm footing," then sudden ruin stands over them, like labor pains upon a woman carrying a child in her womb, and they will not escape.THE THREAD
But woe to those who carry a child in the belly, and to those who give the breast in those days! For there will be great constraint upon the earth, and a swelling of anger upon this people.Luke repeats the Greek phrases for having a child in the womb and nursing at the breast, then names the great distress surrounding them. The shared wording carries Mark’s bodily warning into a second account of the crisis.
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