What Does Mark 3:25 Mean?
And if a house be split against itself, that house cannot stand.
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 if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.THE KEY
The house falls when shared life is cut into competing portions from within.
THE MEANING
A household holds together while its members inhabit a shared life. When its own parts turn against one another, the fracture rises from within, and the whole loses the coherence to stand.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that a household can remain whole while its members are set against one another.
THE ROOT
μερισθῇ
meristhē
GROWS FROM
μερίζω
merizō
To divide into parts or apportion.
“split” in this verse is meristhē. The verb names an internal splitting: the house’s own parts are divided against one another. Its word family carries the senses of part, share, and division, revealing how a shared life can harden into competing portions until the whole cannot stand.
ALSO GROWS
meros: A part, portion, or share.
μέρος
A divided house becomes competing parts of what was one household.
merismos: Division or distribution into parts.
μερισμός
This branch keeps both sides visible: something is apportioned, and the whole is split.
diamerizō: To divide or distribute.
διαμερίζω
This related form appears in Luke 12:13 for dividing an inheritance, where shared household belonging becomes separate claims.
THE PATTERN
A whole remains joined through shared belonging, while division turns its parts against one another.
And the LORD said, Look, they are one people, and they have all one lip; and this is what they begin to do. And now nothing they have devised to do will be walled off from them.A Song of degrees of David. Look, how good and how sweet it is for brothers to settle also together!Now I urge you, brothers, by the nature of our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, that you all say the same thing, and that there be no rending among you, but that you be mended together in the same mind and the same judgment.THE THREAD
And someone from the crowd said to him, Teacher, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.The same verb family appears when someone asks Jesus to have a brother divide an inheritance. There, shared household belonging is split into portions; here, the house itself is divided, and the verse names the consequence: it cannot stand.
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