The Meaning Source “Does Not Exist” -- By: Wayne Grudem

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 02:5 (Dec 1997)
Article: The Meaning Source “Does Not Exist”
Author: Wayne Grudem


The Meaning Source “Does Not Exist”

Wayne Grudem

Liddell-Scott Editor Rejects Egalitarian Interpretation Of “Head” (Kephalē)

A recent letter from one of the world’s leading Greek lexicographers, P.G.W. Glare, has undermined a foundational building block in the egalitarian view of marriage. Glare denies that the word “head” ever had the meaning “source” in ancient Greek literature. Yet this meaning is essential to egalitarian interpretations of Scripture regarding marriage.

Some Background

For several years egalitarians have reinterpreted the verse, “for the husband is the head (Greek kephalē) of the wife as Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:23). They did not want to admit that the husband's role as “head” meant he had authority to lead in the marriage. As an alternative interpretation that removes the idea of authority, they have said that “head” really means “source,” because (they claim) that is what the Greek word kephalē (“head”) meant in ancient Greek literature. They go on to say that if the word “head” just means “source,” then there is no unique male authority in marriage, and no male “headship” (in the commonly understood sense) taught in this verse or in the similar expression in 1 Corinthians 11:3.

Now this reinterpretation was not persuasive, because husbands are not the “source” of their wives in any ordinary sense of “source.” But egalitarians have continued to make this claim nonetheless and have said “source” was a common sense for kephalē in Greek.

Their one piece of evidence from Greek dictionaries (lexicons) was found in the Greek-English Lexicon edited by H. G. Liddell, Robert Scott, and revised by Henry Stuart Jones (ninth edition: Oxford: Clarendon, 1968, pg. 945). Part of the entry in the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon (LSJ or simply Liddell-Scott) reads as follows (with examples given for each section):

II. 1. Of things, extremity

a. In Botany

b. In Anatomy

c. Generally, top, brim of a vessel…capital of a column

d. In plural, source of a river, Herodotus 4.91 (but singular, mouth); generally, source, origin, Orphic Fragments 21a; starting point [examples: the head of time; the head of a month].

Even this entry did not prove the egalitarian claim that a person could be called the “source” of something by using kephalē, because ...

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