"Children" - Part 1: "Son" and "Daughter"

Sometimes the research I do for these articles makes me rethink the English translations of Greek words that I have accepted without thinking about them . This article is about one of those words. The next article in the series on “kids” and “kiddies” is here.

This is the first article in a new series about the Greek words translated as “children.” There are six different Greek words that Jesus used to refer to "children" of various types. They all mean something slightly different, and Jesus used them in different ways, but the distinctions between them are not clear in English translation. This article will only look at the most common of those words, the word usualy translated as “son.”

Jesus referred to “children” in hundreds of verses because he redefined God as “the Father.” He referred to himself as “the son of the man,” a title we examine in another series of articles (starting here). The word translated as “son” alone is found in a hundred and fifty-eight verses. Jesus’s humor and the playfulness of his teaching were evidence of how he embraced his own “inner child,” as we say today. One of the elements of being a descendent or a child was having trust in our parents, which is Jesus’s analogy for trust in the Divine. Jesus saw them as “trusting as much” as he did.” A topic we discuss in another pair of articles started here.

The Greek Word for “Son”

The most common Greek word that is translated as "child" is huios (υἱὸς ). It means a "son," and more generally refers to any descendant, of any generation. It can refer to all the offspring in later generations, just like "fathers" refers to all previous generations of parents. It is translated as "son," and “child” in the Bible. However, in researching this article, I discovered serious problems with translating this as “child,” which is going to force me to correct a lot of my past work. Like most male words, it can be used as a generic term for both sexes when they are descendants of someone. When it refers to "sons" specifically, it should be translated that way, but when it can be applied to both sexes, the word "descendent" is better than "child."

There are two reasons why translating huios as “child” is a problem. The first is that huios can refer to adults, and Jesus almost always uses it that way. In English, “child” can refer to adults, but the main meaning of “children” is the young. If we want to talk about the characteristics of a child, they are different than those of a descendent. Secondly, huios is often a reference to the descendant’s role as an "heir." Jesus uses descendent in verses that connect the “Father” and “reward” to refer to our inheritance from the Divine. Jesus uses another word that specifically means "heir," so translating huios as “heir” is also confusing. Jesus also used huios metaphorically to describe those who follow a way of thought or set of traditions that descend from an individual.

Old And New Testaments

We may expect the use of the word “son” to be more common in the New Testament because of Jesus teaching us to see God as “the Father” and because he called himself “the son of man.” Or maybe because of his teaching that we must become “children” again. However, that would be wrong.

The idea of “descendants” was much more central to the Old Testament stories. Comparing the use of huios between the Old and New Testaments demonstrates how important the idea of “descendants” was before Jesus. In the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, huios is used over four thousand, four hundred times. However, in the New Testament (KJV), this word is used three hundred and seventy-seven times. Adjusting for the difference of number of words in the two halves of the Bible (the OT has about three times more than the NT), this is still a huge difference.

Huios is most commonly translated as “son” in the King James Version (KJV), where it is translated as “child” or “children” only forty-nine times, so less than one-seventh of the times the Greek word appears. I am sure the use of “child” is even more common in modern translations because of the shift of emphasis away from the masculine, but I cannot find any clear statistics. In Greek and in English until just very recently, masculine words were used generically for both sexes.

I generally prefer using more gender-neutral words myself because they better represent the Greek. For example, the Greek word for “man” can also mean “person” and “people.” This is why I prefer “descendant” when translating huios when those who gender is not clearly masculine, but this should only be done selectively with huios because of the role that sons, male heirs, especially the eldest son, played in ancient culture as the main heir, specifically the heir to a family’s “house,” that is, as the leader of their clan. This idea plays an important role in Jesus’s teaching because it was his own role as “the eldest son” of the Divine. For example, in John 8:35:

NIV: Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.

Listeners Heard: The slave, however, doesn't remain in the household through this lifetime. The son remains through this lifetime.

To give modern Bibles their due, they all maintain the translation of “son” here, but that could be because it is viewed as a religious reference to Jesus himself, which is why they translated “lifetime” as “forever,” (see this article).” Jesus’s use of the word meaning “lifetime” is very precise in this verse to refer to all sons, not just himself.

Huios is the word that Jesus uses to refer to himself as “the son of the man” (see this article, which needs updating). However, we shouldn’t think that Jesus uses most of the hundred and fifty-eight verses using huios to refer to himself. He “only” uses “the son of the man” in about fifty-seven verses.

Jesus can and probably does use this word to refer to descendants who are still young, but I haven’t found any. After reviewing the verses that come to mind referring to the young, none of them do not use huios, instead using one of the other five words used to refer to the young of different ages.

The Word for “Daughter”

The Greek word for “daughter” is thygater (θύγατερ). This word is used in only nine verses because it is not nearly as broad as "son” and doesn’t imply “heir.” It refers generally a female descendant of any generation like “son. does male descendents. It can also refer to a, "maidservant," "female slave," and "villages dependent on a city." Suburbs were called “daughters.”

Jesus used it when addressing women of all ages. He addresses individuals with in in Matthew 9:22, Luke 8:48, etc. He used it to address groups of women (Luke 23:28). Another common use of it was when listing all members of a family as in Matthew 10:37, Luke 12:53, etc. He also uses it to describe certain people such as “a daugher of Abraham” (Luke 13:16).

Both Sexes

Translating huios as “descendant” is more accurate and less confusing, but it is not nearly so poetic. However, the word clearly referred to children of both sexes. For example, Luke 20:34:

KJV: The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage:

NIV: The people of this age marry and are given in marriage.

Listeners Heard: The descendants of this age here marry and are married.

In this verse, the word huios is translated as “children,” “people,” and “descendants.” “Since we are referring to marrying and being given in marriage, Jesus is clearly talking about both sexes. We are also talking about children that are grown enough to become parents. Children” is the most interesting, poetic and more in line with our religious traditions. “Descendants” isn’t nearly as pretty.