What Does Romans 1:29 Mean?
Filled with all unalignment, sexual immorality, wickedness, grasping for more, malice; full of envy, slaying, strife, bait, ill-will; whisperers.
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
Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,THE KEY
The verse links grasping, violence, deception, and even whispered speech as expressions of a life filled with misalignment.
THE MEANING
This verse names a life saturated with misalignment: appetite and hostility appear alongside envy, violence, deception, and whispered harm. The list gathers these into one condition rather than unrelated lapses; what fills a life spills into what it does and says.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that greed, envy, violence, deception, and whispering are separate flaws with no shared source; the verse gathers them as parts of one life filled with misalignment.
THE ROOT
ἀδικίᾳ
adikía
GROWS FROM
δικ-
dik-
The Greek dik- family carries the sense of what is right or just; the prefix a- marks its absence or violation.
“unalignment” in this verse is adikía. The verse describes more than a single wrong act: it says life is filled with what is out of alignment. The word belongs to the same family as terms for justice and alignment, so the list names life displaced from right relation.
ALSO GROWS
díkaios: Just; aligned with what is right.
δίκαιος
Its positive form makes the shared word-family visible: the verse names a condition outside this alignment.
dikaiosýnē: Justice; alignment with what is right.
δικαιοσύνη
This word shares the dik- root and reveals the connection between unrighteousness and misalignment.
πλεονεξίᾳ
pleonexía
GROWS FROM
πλεονεκτ-
pleonekt-
The drive to have more, from πλέον (pléon, more) and ἔχειν (échein, to have).
“grasping for more” in this verse is pleonexía. Covetousness is an appetite for more, even while it already holds something. Set inside a life described as filled, it exposes the strain between fullness and a desire still organized around acquiring more.
ALSO GROWS
pleonéktēs: A covetous person; one who grasps for more.
πλεονέκτης
It names the person shaped by the same more-having impulse.
pleonektéō: To gain advantage, take advantage, or defraud.
πλεονεκτέω
The verb shows how the desire for more can move from appetite into action toward another person.
ψιθυριστάς
psithyristás
GROWS FROM
ψιθυρ-
psithyr-
Whispering or murmuring, especially secret speech.
Whisperers appear in the same list as murder, deceit, and malice. The word keeps quiet, hidden speech within the same field of harm, even when it stays out of public view.
ALSO GROWS
psithyrízō: To whisper or murmur.
ψιθυρίζω
The verb reveals the speech action behind the person named in the verse.
psithyrismós: Whispering or secret talk.
ψιθυρισμός
The noun makes the connection between the whisperer and the act of whispering explicit.
THE PATTERN
Destructive life becomes a single condition when inward appetite spreads into action, relationships, and speech.
And the LORD saw that the harm of humankind was great in the earth, and that every shaping of the thoughts of his heart was only harm all the day.All these evil things come from within and make the man common.For where boiling and strife are, there is no standing still and every base deed.THE THREAD
Do not set your limbs as weapons of crookedness unto falling short; but set yourselves beside God, as those living out from the dead, and your limbs as weapons of alignment unto God.Romans 6:13 uses the same Greek root as unrighteousness here, linking misalignment to what the body can enact. It sets that use beside the possibility of alignment, showing the catalogue as something embodied rather than abstract.
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