What Does Mark 5:25 Mean?
And a certain woman, who had a flow of blood for twelve years,
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 a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years,THE KEY
What English calls an “issue” is, in Greek, a flow: the verse begins by naming a body’s continuing movement of loss.
THE MEANING
The verse gives prolonged bleeding a plain name and counts its years without explaining it away. A condition can be real and long-running without becoming a judgment about your worth.
THE ROOT
ῥύσει
rhýsei
GROWS FROM
ῥέω
rheō
To flow or run.
The Greek phrase describes the woman as being in a flow of blood, keeping the body’s ongoing process visible. English “issue” can sound like an abstract problem; the root carries movement, and the twelve years give that movement its duration.
ALSO GROWS
rheō: To flow or run.
ῥέω
The verb makes clear that the word describes ongoing movement, not a fixed label.
rheuma: A stream or current.
ῥεῦμα
A current is flow made perceptible, echoing how this verse names the body’s continuing condition.
haimorrhoeō: To suffer a flow of blood.
αἱμορροέω
This related compound joins “blood” to “flow,” making explicit the physical process named in the verse.
THE PATTERN
Scripture names bodily suffering in physical detail, letting its lived reality stand in the text.
And if a woman flows with the flow of her blood many days outside the time of her separation, or if it runs beyond the time of her separation, all the days of the flow of her soiling shall be like the days of her separation, and she is soiled.And a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years, and who had spent all her living on physicians, and could not be healed by any,So went forth the Adversary from the face of the LORD, and struck Job with a harmful boil from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.THE THREAD
And at once the spring of her blood dried up, and she knew in her body that she was healed of the scourge.Verse 25 uses αἷμα (haima, blood); verse 29 returns to the same word when it says the fountain of her blood dries up. The first verse names the ongoing flow, and the next names its cessation within her body.
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