What Does Matthew 15:20 Mean?
These are what make a person common, but to eat with unwashed hands does not make a person common.
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
These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.THE KEY
Defilement is a movement from set-apart to common, and this verse locates it in what comes from a person, not in food touching unwashed hands.
THE MEANING
What comes from within you carries the power to make you common; eating with unwashed hands does not. The verse locates the deeper boundary in what your inner life sends outward, not in what merely touches your body.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that outward washing can make a person clean while what they release from within goes untouched.
THE ROOT
κοινόω
koinoō
GROWS FROM
κοιν-
koin-
Common; to make common or treat as profane.
The Greek verb κοινόω (koinoō, make common or treat as profane) gives defilement the sense of a shift from set-apart to common. Its word family also includes κοινός (koinos, common or shared) and κοινωνία (koinōnia, sharing in common), revealing a change in how a person is regarded rather than contamination from an unwashed meal.
ALSO GROWS
koinos: Common, shared, or ordinary.
κοινός
This branch makes visible the contrast beneath “defile”: what is set apart becomes common.
koinōnia: Sharing in common; participation.
κοινωνία
This related word carries the same seed of commonness into shared participation, showing how the root reaches beyond physical cleanliness.
THE PATTERN
What flows from within a person carries the deeper weight, while outward contact alone does not define their purity.
There is nothing from outside a man, entering into him, that can make him common. But the things coming out of a man, those are the things that make the man common.Above every watch you keep, guard your heart, for from it flow the springs of life.And the tongue is fire, a world of crookedness. It is set among our limbs, staining the whole body and setting the wheel of becoming ablaze, and it is lit by Gehenna.THE THREAD
But what comes out of the mouth comes forth from the heart, and that makes a person common.Matthew 15:18 uses the same Greek verb κοινόω (koinoō, make common) for what comes from the heart and defiles. Read beside it, the contrast with unwashed hands directs attention to the inner source of what a person sends outward.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us