Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
sarx
Flesh. Sometimes meat, sometimes the body, sometimes a whole orientation of life.
Romans 8:5, in every translation this tool compares.
He is my own flesh and blood. Nothing about meat. English already uses the word for kinship and for weakness, and you never confuse them.
Because Paul uses it for a disposition rather than for the body, and a reader who hears flesh as physical ends up with a theology that treats matter as the problem.
Versions read flesh, sinful nature, or human nature. The NIV used sinful nature for years and reverted to flesh in 2011.
σάρξ sarx · G4561
Sarx covers meat, the physical body, human beings generally, kinship, and in Paul a way of living oriented away from God. Which one is meant is decided by context every single time.
English flesh is overwhelmingly physical, so Paul's non-physical use reads as a claim about bodies that he is not making.
A word with a wide range is decided by context, not by its most common meaning. Reading the most common sense into every occurrence is how a word study goes wrong.
Flesh is the majority rendering and the NIV's return to it in 2011 settled the main modern departure.
- sarx as meat: 1 Corinthians 15:39
- sarx as kinship: Romans 9:3
- sarx as orientation: Romans 8:5-8; Galatians 5:19-21
