Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.
Parallel translations
- WEB Husbands, love your wives, and don’t be bitter against them.
- BSB Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
- NKJV Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them.
- NASB Husbands, love your wives and do not become bitter against them.
- NLT Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
Husbands are to love their wives actively and refuse to let resentment or harshness take root. It matters because Christian marriage is meant to display self-giving, Christlike love.
Overview
In his household instructions, Paul addresses husbands directly, balancing the wife's submission (v. 18) with a sacrificial command to love. The warning against bitterness guards against the daily hardness and coldness that can replace love over time. Ephesians 5 makes explicit what is implied here: this love is patterned on Christ's love for the church, who gave himself for her.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 14
- 1 Pet 3:7Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.
- Gen 2:23–24And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
- Col 3:21Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.
- Eph 5:25Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
- Eph 5:28–29So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.
- Eph 4:31Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:
- Eph 5:33Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.
- Prov 5:18–19Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.
- Eccl 9:9Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.
- Mal 2:14–16Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.
- Jas 3:14But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth.
- Luke 14:26If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
- Gen 24:67And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.
- Rom 3:14Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Christ at the center
The image of the invisible God, firstborn over creation, in whom all things hold together and all the fullness of God dwells bodily — supreme over every power.
How Colossians 3:19 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Greek word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.