What Does Matthew 13:27 Mean?
So the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? From where then does it have weeds?
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
So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?THE KEY
The servants trace the unexpected tares back to their source: their presence in the field does not mean the householder sowed them.
THE MEANING
Good planting and harmful growth can appear in the same field, and the servants ask where the tares came from. Their question leaves open a distinction between what the householder sowed and what has appeared since.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The presence of harmful growth does not prove the good source produced it.
THE ROOT
ἔσπειρας
espeiras
GROWS FROM
σπειρ-
speir-
To sow or scatter seed.
Greek keeps “sowed” and “seed” in one word family: the seed is what has been sown. The servants’ question is therefore about who planted what is growing, not merely about what they see.
ALSO GROWS
speirō: To sow, scatter seed.
σπείρω
The verb names the planting act that the servants attribute to the householder.
sperma: Seed, what is sown.
σπέρμα
This is the seed the servants say the householder planted as good.
spora: Sowing, seed.
σπορά
This related form keeps the focus on the act and result of planting.
THE PATTERN
What appears carries a source, and unlike growth need not come from the same sower.
And God said, "Let the earth sprout green growth, the seed-bearing plant, and the fruit tree making fruit after its kind, whose seed is in it, upon the earth." And it was so.Does the same spring gush from the same opening, the sweet and the bitter?But while humankind slept, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.THE THREAD
But while humankind slept, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.The same Greek sowing word appears here for the householder’s good seed and there for the enemy’s tares. The question “from whence” asks which sower is behind the growth.
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