What Does Matthew 22:26 Mean?
Likewise the second also, and the third, to the seventh.
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
Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh.THE KEY
“Likewise” makes each brother a repeat of the one before him, but repetition does not tell us what lies beyond the pattern.
THE MEANING
The verse presents a succession in which each brother occupies the same place in the story, all the way to the seventh. A repeated human arrangement can seem to define the whole future, even while the question of what lies beyond it remains open.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that a pattern repeated through every case must continue unchanged beyond death.
THE ROOT
ὁμοίως
homoiōs
GROWS FROM
ὁμοι-
like, alike, of the same kind
“Likewise” in this verse is homoiōs. The Greek word belongs to a family built around likeness: each brother is presented as repeating the same arrangement. That sameness is the premise of the list, but it does not establish that the same arrangement governs life beyond it.
ALSO GROWS
hómoios: like, similar
ὅμοιος
This related word makes explicit the likeness that links each brother’s place in the sequence.
homoiōma: likeness, form
ὁμοίωμα
It shows how the root can describe a likeness or pattern taking shape, as the brothers repeat one arrangement.
homoiotēs: similarity
ὁμοιότης
This branch names the shared quality that makes the succession seem like one unbroken pattern.
THE PATTERN
A repeated earthly sequence does not by itself define the life beyond it.
What has been is what is to be; what is done is what is to be done. Nothing is new under the sun.Jesus said to her, I am the rising, and the life. Whoever leans their weight into me, even if they die, will live.So also is the rising of the dead. It is sown in decay; it is awakened in what does not decay.THE THREAD
For in the rising they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the messengers of God in heaven.The repeated marriages in this verse form the premise that the next verse directly reframes. The sequence describes this life; Jesus says resurrection life does not simply continue its arrangement.
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