What Does Mark 5:5 Mean?
Always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying out and gashing himself with stones.
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 always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.THE KEY
The verb translated “cutting himself” belongs to a Greek word family that also names mourning, so the wounds carry grief in the language of the verse.
THE MEANING
When suffering closes around you, it can seem to occupy every hour and every place; this verse gives that engulfment an unsoftened image. The cry and bodily injury remain visible together, with no pause in the scene.
THE ROOT
κατακόπτων
katakoptōn
GROWS FROM
κοπ-
kop-
Cut, strike; in a middle form, beat oneself in grief.
“cutting himself” in this verse is katakoptōn. The English “cutting” can sound like an isolated action, but this Greek word belongs to a family that also names beating the breast and mourning. That makes the bodily wounds resonate with grief without turning the verse’s self-injury into a metaphor.
ALSO GROWS
ekkoptō: Cut out; cut off.
ἐκκόπτω
This related verb keeps the root’s concrete sense of cutting in view.
koptomai: Beat the breast; mourn, lament.
κόπτομαι
The same word family can describe grief expressed through the body, deepening the force of the wounds in this verse.
μνημείοις
mnēmeíois
GROWS FROM
μνημ-
mnēm-
Memory, remembrance.
“tombs” in this verse is mnēmeíois. The Greek word for tomb belongs to a family of words for remembrance. The setting is therefore not only a place of burial but a landscape marked by what is remembered about the dead.
ALSO GROWS
mnēmē: Memory; remembrance.
μνήμη
It makes explicit the remembrance carried in the word for tomb.
mimnēskō: Remember; call to mind.
μιμνῄσκω
This related verb shows the same root of remembrance at work as an action.
THE PATTERN
Anguish takes shape through both the body and the place a person inhabits.
And he took a potsherd to scrape himself with it, and he sat down among the ashes.You lay me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the sunken deeps.For we who are in this tent groan, weighed down, not that we wish to be unclothed, but to be clothed over, so that what dies is swallowed up by life.THE THREAD
Look, he comes with the clouds, and every eye will see him, and those who pierced him. All the tribes of the earth will beat their breasts over him. Yes, amen.The Greek verb κατακόπτων (katakoptōn, cutting or gashing) contains the root κοπ- (kop-, cut or strike), which also appears in Revelation’s “shall wail.” The shared root lets bodily cutting and mourning stand in one word family, while Mark’s verse still describes actual injury.
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