Exodus 20:12 · Symbol · Honour
The Words Kabod and Time
The Hebrew and Greek words for honour also speak of heaviness and of worth.
The King James Version renders the Hebrew verb kabad by words as far apart as glorify, harden and be rich.
Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your harvest;
- The word
- כָּבוֹד (kabod), H3519
- First appears
- Genesis 31:1 “Now Jacob heard that Laban’s sons were saying,…”
Summary
The Hebrew verb kabad means to be heavy and also to honour, and the noun kabod names weight, wealth, honour and glory. Its opposite, qalal, means to be light. In the New Testament the noun time names the honour given to a person and the price of a thing, and the verb timao means to set a value on something or to honour someone.
- Kabod stands more often in the Psalms than in any other book of the Bible.
- In the order of the canon, timao first stands in Matthew 15:4, where Jesus quotes the fifth commandment.
- The Greek word for honour also served as the word for a sum of silver paid out.
The First Uses of Kabad and Kabod
Genesis gives the verb and the noun their first uses in the stories of Sodom and of Jacob.
This study follows the Hebrew verb kabad, its noun kabod and its opposite qalal, and the Greek noun time with its verb timao, through the verses that set their sense. Honour is one of the values of Scripture, and these words show what the writers meant when they commanded it.
The question this study answers is whether the words always mean honour, and what their other senses add. It gives the counts of six words in the STEP Bible's tagged Hebrew and Greek and the verses where heavy and light stand against each other. It then gives the two senses of time and the two readings of the double honour owed to elders.
Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great. Because their sin is so grievous,It stands here as the verb's first use in the canon, where the tagged Hebrew glosses it “it is heavy” and the Berean text renders it “so grievous”.
The noun first stands in Genesis 31:1, where Laban's sons speak of the “wealth” Jacob had built.
Where the Words Stand
Four Hebrew words of weight and lightness stand beside two Greek words of honour and price.
The noun kabod is the most frequent of the six words, and the Greek verb timao the rarest.
| Word | Sense | Rows | Verses | Books with the most rows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hebrew | ||||
| kabod, כָּבוֹד, H3519, noun | properly, weight, but only figuratively in a good sense, splendor or copiousness | 200 | 189 | Psalms 51, Isaiah 38, Ezekiel 19; 27 books in all |
| kabad, כָּבַד, H3513, verb | heavy in a bad sense (burdensome, severe, dull) or in a good sense (numerous, rich, honorable) | 113 | 106 | Isaiah 20, Psalms 11, 1 Samuel 11; 26 books in all |
| kabed, כָּבֵד, H3515, adjective | heavy | 41 | 40 | Exodus 12, Genesis 9, 1 Kings 4; 12 books in all |
| qalal, קָלַל, H7043, verb | to be (causatively, make) light | 82 | 79 | 2 Samuel 11, Leviticus 7, Genesis 6; 22 books in all |
| Greek | ||||
| time, τιμή, G5092, noun | a price paid or received; esteem, honour | 41 | 40 | Romans 6, Acts 6, Revelation 6; 13 books in all |
| timao, τιμάω, G5091, verb | to fix the value; to honour | 20 | 15 | John 6, Matthew 5, Mark 3; 8 books in all |
time, τιμή, G5092, noun, timao, τιμάω, G5091, verb
The Hebrew senses are Strong's definitions of 1890. The counts are those of the STEP Bible tagging, where a verse that uses a word twice holds two rows, and a printed concordance may differ by a few.
Kabad and Kabod in the Law and the Prophets
The command of Sinai, the words of Joseph, the grief of Shiloh and the charge of Malachi carry the verb and the noun.
Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.The tagged Hebrew opens the command with kabbed, the imperative of the verb's intensive stem, glossed “honor”.
Tell my father about all my splendor in Egypt and everything you have seen. And bring my father down here quickly.”Here kabod, glossed “honor my” and rendered “my splendor”, names the standing Joseph had in Egypt.
“A son honors his father, and a servant his master. But if I am a father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is your fear of Me?” says the LORD of Hosts to you priests who despise My name. “But you ask, ‘How have we despised Your name?’Malachi sets the verb and the noun in one verse, the honour a son gives and the honour God asks of His priests.
And she named the boy Ichabod, saying, “The glory has departed from Israel,” because the ark of God had been captured and her father-in-law and her husband had been killed.Here kabod names the glory of God that left Israel with the ark, and a mother names her son for its loss.
Malachi 1:6, 1 Samuel 4:21
Heavy and Light
Genesis, Exodus and 1 Samuel show the verb of weight set against the verb of lightness, and where each keeps its plain sense.
Therefore, the LORD, the God of Israel, declares: ‘I did indeed say that your house and the house of your father would walk before Me forever. But now the LORD declares: Far be it from Me! For I will honor those who honor Me, but those who despise Me will be disdained.The tagged Hebrew uses kabad twice for honour and closes with qalal, glossed “they will be insignificant”, so heavy and light stand in one sentence.
Anyone who curses his father or mother must surely be put to death.The verb rendered “curses” is qalal, to make light, the opposite of the honour the commandment asks.
Qalal first stands in Genesis 8:8, where Noah sent out a dove “to see if the waters had receded from the surface of the ground”. The adjective kabed first stands in Genesis 12:10, where “the famine was severe”. In Genesis 13:2 the same adjective says that Abram “had become extremely wealthy”.
A word's meaning is set by its use in a verse, and the sense of its root cannot be read into every use. The lexicon allows the picture of honour as weight, and the verses show the same root naming a famine, a sin and a fortune.
Time and Timao, Honour and Price
Three verses of Matthew, Paul and Peter show both senses of the noun.
Abbott-Smith's Manual Greek Lexicon (1922) gives time a first sense, “a price paid or received”, and a second, “esteem, honour”.
Then what was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price set on Him by the people of Israel,Matthew uses both words of the thirty pieces of silver, the noun for the price and the verb for setting it on Jesus.
you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body.Believers were bought, so the word here is the price paid for them.
Husbands, in the same way, treat your wives with consideration as a delicate vessel, and with honor as fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered.Peter uses the noun for the honour a husband owes his wife as a fellow heir.
Voices on the Words
One voice of the third century reads 1 Samuel 2:30 beside 1 Corinthians 6:20.
died 258 · Cyprian
Treatise IV. On the Lord's Prayer.
Those who call God Father honour Him in the body that was bought at a price.
The quotation1 quotation
“We ought then, beloved brethren, to remember and to know, that when we call God Father, we ought to act as God's children; so that in the measure in which we find pleasure in considering God as a Father, He might also be able to find pleasure in us. Let us converse as temples of God, that it may be plain that God dwells in us. Let not our doings be degenerate from the Spirit; so that we who have begun to be heavenly and spiritual, may consider and do nothing but spiritual and heavenly things; since the Lord God Himself has said, ‘Them that honour me I will honour; and he that despiseth me shall be despised.’ The blessed apostle also has laid down in his epistle: ‘Ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear about God in your body.’”
Cyprian · Treatise IV. On the Lord's Prayer. · on 1 Corinthians 6:20Patristic
What Double Honour Means
Two readings of Paul's charge about elders differ on whether their honour includes support.
Elders who lead effectively are worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching.The verse stands here because its noun is time, and readers have taken it of respect, of support or of both.
John Calvin read the double honour as both “the reverence which is due to them” and “the recompense to which their services are entitled” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 2, chapter 8, section 35).
Tertullian rebuked the custom of giving presiding elders “double shares (of meat and drink)”. He wrote that the apostle gave them double honour “as being both brothers and officers” (On Fasting, chapter 17).
Against Tertullian's reading stands the next verse, where Paul gives his reason in two sayings of Scripture. The first is “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain”, and the second is “The worker is worthy of his wages” (1 Timothy 5:18). Against Calvin's, Tertullian finds the double in the elder's two roles and needs no reward to explain it.
Worthy to Receive Honour
In Revelation the noun stands in the praise that heaven gives the Lamb.
In both Testaments the words for honour say what a person or a thing is worth, and Scripture gives the highest worth to God.
In a loud voice they were saying: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing!”The verse stands here because heaven counts honour among the things the Lamb is worthy to receive.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Strong's definitions (1890) for the Hebrew, with the STEP Bible TBESH and TBESG glosses (Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- STEP Bible, Translators Amalgamated Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, the tagged texts (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), the entries for time and timao.
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 2, chapter 8, section 35, the English text of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
- Tertullian, On Fasting, chapter 17, on 1 Timothy 5:17.
- Cyprian, Treatise 4, On the Lord's Prayer, on 1 Corinthians 6:20.
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