And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
| Word | Greek | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| And | δὲ de | G1161 | but · conjunction |
| answered | ἀποκριθεὶς apokritheis | G611 | to conclude for oneself · verb — aorist passive deponent participle, nominative singular masculine |
| said | εἶπεν eipen | G2036 | to speak or say (by word or writing) · verb — second aorist active indicative, 3rd person singular |
| them | αὐτούς; autous | G846 | the reflexive pronoun self · personal pronoun — accusative plural masculine |
| Have ye | ἀνέγνωτε anegnōte | G314 | to know again · verb — second aorist active indicative, 2nd person plural |
| not | οὐκ ouk | G3756 | the absolute negative (compare G3361 (μή)) adverb · particle — negative |
| read | ἀναγινώσκω anaginṓskō | G314 | to know again |
| that | ὅτι hoti | G3754 | demonstrative · conjunction |
| he which made | ἐποίησεν epoiēsen | G4160 | to make or do (in a very wide application · verb — aorist active indicative, 3rd person singular |
| at | ἀπ᾽ ap᾽ | G575 | "off · preposition |
| the beginning | ἀρχῆς archēs | G746 | (properly abstract) a commencement · noun — genitive singular feminine |
| made | ποιέω poiéō | G4160 | to make or do (in a very wide application |
| them | αὐτός autós | G846 | the reflexive pronoun self |
| male | ἄρσεν arsen | G730 | male (as stronger for lifting) · adjective — accusative singular neuter |
| and | καὶ kai | G2532 | and · conjunction |
| female | θῆλυ thēlu | G2338 | female · adjective — accusative singular neuter |
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female--or better, perhaps, "He that made them made them from the beginning a male and a female."
And he answered and said unto them,.... Not by replying directly to the question, but by referring them to the original creation of man, and to the first institution of marriage, previous to the law of Moses; have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning, made them male and female? This may be read in Genesis 1:27 and from thence this sense of things collected; that God, who in the beginning of time, or of the creation, as Mark expresses it, made all things, the heavens, and the earth, and all that is therein, and particularly "man", as the Vulgate Latin, and Munster's Hebrew Gospel supply it here, made the first parents of mankind, male and female; not male and females, but on…
Read the whole note in the consoleMatthew 19:3-9 Matthew 19:3-9 Mark 10:2-12 3. And the Pharisees came to him, tempting him, and saying to him, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever? 4. Who answering said to them, Have you not read, that he who made them at first, [593] made them male and female? 5. And he said, Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall be one flesh. 6. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh: what God therefore hath joined, let not man separate. 7. They say to him, Why then did Moses order to give a letter of divorcement, and send her away? 8. He said to them, Moses, for the hardness of your heart, permitted you to divor…
Read the whole note in the consoleThe Pharisees were not considering all of God’s word. The Creator had made marriage as a permanent union (see Gen 2:18-25; see also 1 Cor 7:10-16).
(V. 4.) And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female? This is written in the beginning of Genesis. But in saying male and female, he pointed towards monogamous marriages. For he did not say males and females, which was sought after due to the repudiation of the former, but male and female, so that the bond of one spouse might be established.
(Cont. Faust. xix. 29.) Behold now out of the books of Moses it is proved to the Jews that a wife may not be put away. For they thought that they were doing according to the purport of Moses' law when they did put them away. This also we learn hence by the testimony of Christ Himself, that it was God who made it thus, and joined them male and female; which when the Manichæans deny, they are condemned, resisting the Gospel of Christ.
But He so frames His answer as to evade their snare. He brings in the testimony of Holy Writ, and the law of nature, and opposing God's first sentence to this second, He answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female? This is written in the beginning of Genesis. This teaches that second marriages are to be avoided, for He said not male and females, which was what was sought by the putting away of the first, but, male and female, implying only one tie of wedlock.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Clarke, Gill, Calvin and Keil & Delitzsch are in the public domain; Tyndale Open Study Notes © Tyndale House Publishers, CC BY-SA 4.0 — all from the Free Use Bible API (bible.helloao.org). Rashi: the Rosenbaum & Silbermann Pentateuch (public domain) and the Judaica Press and Metsudah Tanakh (CC BY), via Sefaria. Spurgeon's Treasury of David: public domain (lyteword's markdown edition, CC0).
