What Does Romans 16:13 Mean?
Embrace Rufus, picked out in the Lord, and his mother and mine.
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
Salute Rufus chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.THE KEY
Rufus’s mother is “mine” too: the verse names a kinship that crosses household lines.
THE MEANING
In the Lord, being chosen and belonging to a family of care stand together. Rufus is named as chosen, and his mother is also claimed as mother. The verse presents kinship that reaches beyond one household.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that only blood can make someone truly family: Rufus’s mother is also “mine” in the Lord.
THE ROOT
ἐκλεκτόν
eklekton
GROWS FROM
λεγ- (leg-), in ἐκλέγω (eklegō)
Pick out, select; with ἐκ (ek), “out,” the word names one selected.
“picked out” in this verse is eklekton. English “chosen” can sound like a settled label, while its Greek word family keeps selection visible. Rufus is marked out in the Lord, and the verse places that belonging beside the intimate bond of a shared mother.
ALSO GROWS
eklegomai: Choose, select
ἐκλέγομαι
This verb makes the act behind being chosen visible; Luke 6:13 uses it when Jesus chooses twelve disciples.
eklogē: Choice, election
ἐκλογή
The related noun names selection itself; Romans 11:5 uses it for a remnant according to election.
THE PATTERN
Belonging in the Lord takes the form of real kinship that crosses household boundaries.
For whoever does the will of God, this one is my brother, and my sister, and my mother.Then he said to the disciple, Behold your mother! And from that hour the disciple took her into his own house.But the Jerusalem above is free; she is the mother of us all.THE THREAD
Coming to him, as to a living stone, tested and set aside by men, but chosen by God and precious,Peter uses the same Greek word family for “chosen” when describing the living stone. The word links Rufus’s being chosen in the Lord with what is chosen and precious to God.
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