What Does Matthew 19:8 Mean?
He said to them, Because of the stiffness of your hearts, Moses allowed you to send away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
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
He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.THE KEY
A permitted release is named as a response to hardness, while the beginning remains the measure of the union.
THE MEANING
This verse holds two realities together: hardened hearts receive permission to dismiss a spouse, and that permission does not make dismissal the pattern from the beginning. It speaks now wherever a human allowance is mistaken for the deepest truth of a bond.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that because something is permitted, it must belong to the original design.
THE ROOT
σκληροκαρδία
sklērokardía
GROWS FROM
Greek compound: σκληρός (sklēros) + καρδία (kardía)
Hardness of heart; the compound joins “hard” and “heart.”
“stiffness of your hearts” in this verse is sklērokardía. The phrase locates the concession in hardened hearts rather than in the creation pattern. The verse distinguishes what that hardness is permitted to do from what was true “from the beginning.”
ALSO GROWS
sklērótēs: hardness
σκληρότης
This related form names the quality of being hard, making the condition behind the concession explicit.
sklērýnō: to harden
σκληρύνω
The verb shows the same word family describing hardening as a process, not merely a fixed label.
kardía: heart
καρδία
This component identifies where the hardness is located: in the heart.
ἀπολῦσαι
apolýsai
GROWS FROM
λύω (lýō), “loosen” or “release,” in ἀπολύω (apolýō), “release” or “dismiss”
To release, dismiss, or send away; in this setting, to divorce.
“send away” in this verse is apolýsai. The verb names putting away as release or dismissal, and its ordinary range can include sending someone away. Here the permission to release sits beside the statement that this is not how it was from the beginning.
ALSO GROWS
lýō: to loosen or release
λύω
The base verb carries the sense of loosening that remains inside the word for dismissal.
apolýō: to release or dismiss
ἀπολύω
This is the verb family used for sending away, including the act named in this verse.
apólysis: release or dismissal
ἀπόλυσις
The related noun preserves the same release-and-dismissal language, bringing the act into view as a form of sending away.
THE PATTERN
An accommodation to human hardness can regulate rupture without making rupture the original design.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.When a man takes a wife and marries her, and if she finds no favor in his eyes, because he finds some nakedness in her, then he writes her a writ of cutting away, places it in her hand, and sends her out of his house.Jesus answered and said to them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this command.THE THREAD
Jesus answered and said to them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this command.Mark uses the same Greek compound, σκληροκαρδία (sklērokardía, “hardness of heart”), linking the two statements at the root. It clarifies that the provision answers human hardness rather than describing the beginning’s pattern.
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