What Does Matthew 19:10 Mean?
His disciples said to him, If this is how it stands for a man with his wife, it is not good to take a wife.
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
His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.THE KEY
The word translated “good” means “advantageous,” so the disciples are weighing marriage’s cost to them, not calling marriage evil.
THE MEANING
A bond that cannot be set aside casually can look like a poor bargain when the mind measures it by personal advantage. The disciples voice that calculation plainly: under this condition, marriage seems not to benefit them. The verse makes visible how quickly commitment becomes a ledger of cost.
THE ROOT
συμφέρει
sympherei
GROWS FROM
φέρ- (φέρω), with συν-
φέρω (pherō) means carry, bear, or bring; συν- (syn-) means together or with. Together they form συμφέρω (sympherō), commonly meaning to benefit or be advantageous.
English “good” can sound like a moral judgment about marriage, while συμφέρει asks whether it benefits or serves an outcome. The compound carries an image of bringing together beneath that established meaning, so the disciples’ line reads as a calculation of what the bond entails rather than a declaration that marriage is evil.
ALSO GROWS
sympheron: What benefits; what is advantageous.
σύμφερον
This cognate appears in 1 Corinthians 12:7, where the benefit is shared with the whole assembly; it shows that advantage can be measured beyond private convenience.
prospherō: Bring forward; offer.
προσφέρω
This compound shares the φέρω root and preserves its concrete sense of bringing, beneath the more idiomatic “be advantageous” in this verse.
THE PATTERN
In this word family, advantage names what serves an outcome or a shared good, even when an immediate cost is involved.
And if your right eye trips you, tear it out and throw it from you. For it profits you that one of your members perish, and not that your whole body be thrown into Gehenna.Nor do you reckon that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.But the showing of the breath is given to each one, for what carries us together.THE THREAD
But the showing of the breath is given to each one, for what carries us together.The Greek word translated “profit” shares the same root as the disciples’ “good” and points to benefit for the whole assembly. That connection makes their line visible as a personal cost calculation, not a verdict on the worth of every marriage.
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