What Does Mark 6:32 Mean?
And they went away by ship into an empty place by themselves.
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 they departed into a desert place by ship privately.THE KEY
The “desert place” is not simply terrain: it is a place emptied of the crowd and made their own.
THE MEANING
You meet the verse in a shared departure: they travel by boat toward a place marked by absence and privacy. Here, solitude has a location and a boundary; a group can be together while apart from the public flow.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse unsettles the belief that solitude means being alone: they go privately, yet they go together.
THE ROOT
ἔρημον
erēmon
GROWS FROM
ἐρημ-
Greek lexical stem
Desolate, solitary, uninhabited.
“empty place” in this verse is erēmon. The English “desert” can suggest terrain; this word names a place by its desolation and solitude. Paired with “privately,” it gives the destination both an absence of surrounding people and a sense of being apart from them.
ALSO GROWS
erēmia: Desolation; wilderness.
ἐρημία
This related word keeps the emphasis on a place defined by being uninhabited or removed from ordinary life.
erēmoō: To make desolate or lay waste.
ἐρημόω
The same word family names both the desolate condition and the act of leaving a place desolate.
ἰδίαν
idian
GROWS FROM
ἰδι- (Greek lexical stem of ἴδιος)
One’s own; belonging particularly to oneself.
“Privately” grows from the idea of what is one’s own. The phrase marks a space apart from the crowd, but the plural “they” makes clear that this is shared privacy, not solitary isolation.
ALSO GROWS
idios: One’s own; private; particular.
ἴδιος
This is the word behind the phrase translated “privately,” tying privacy to a space set apart as their own.
idiōtēs: A private individual; a layperson.
ἰδιώτης
This related word retains the sense of an individual outside a public role, echoing the group’s departure from the surrounding public flow.
THE PATTERN
A space apart from the crowd can become a setting for encounter.
Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the dawn rose.A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah. O God, you are my God; at dawn I seek you. My living soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you in a dry and weary land, where there are no waters.But he himself pulled back into the wilderness and prayed.THE THREAD
And he said to them, Come away by yourselves into an empty place, and rest a while, for many were coming and going, and they did not have a well-timed moment even to eat.The words translated “desert place” and “apart” in verse 31 recur in verse 32. Verse 31 names the invitation; verse 32 shows the group moving toward that shared space away from the crowd.
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