StrongerBible

rhutis

ῥυτίς

GreekG4512“wrinkle”

Appears 1 time · tap a cell to see the verses

Eph 5:27
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradehroo-TEECEnoun

What rhutis means

a wrinkle in aging skin: the pucker or crease that age leaves on a face or body

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Everywhere it appears in Greek, this word names a wrinkle in skin, the tell-tale crease of an aging face. Comic poets used it to mock a wrinkled old woman, and a famous scene in Plato has a god smoothing away the puckers left on freshly made human bodies. Doctors and cosmetic writers used it the same way, for skin that has drawn tight and shriveled, and it even carried over to the wrinkled skin of shrinking fruit or the wrinkled bark of a tree. The underlying picture is of something drawn together into a pucker.

The Bible uses the word only once, in Ephesians 5:27, where Christ presents the church to himself as a bride without spot or wrinkle. Read against the wedding imagery of the passage, this is the language of a bride bathed, beautified, and made young: not a bride whose dress happens to be uncreased, but a bride whose very skin shows no mark of age or decay. Alongside it stands a paired word for a spot or blemish, and together the two describe a person made flawless and radiant.

Because this is the only time the word occurs in Scripture, there is no range of biblical senses to sort out. It carries its single ordinary Greek meaning, and the interpretive interest lies not in what the word means but in how the wedding picture around it is meant to be heard.

Eph 5:27

Disputed

Whether ῥυτίς in Ephesians 5:27 denotes a wrinkle on the bride's skin or a fold/crease in her garment.

  • majorityA wrinkle on aging skin, read within the nuptial-bath imagery of Ephesians 5:26-27; the extrabiblical Greek evidence is univocal for skin, and no classical, Hellenistic, or documentary text uses the word for cloth-folds.; BDAG, s.v. ῥυτίς; Markus Barth, Ephesians 4-6 (Anchor Bible 34A), 1974; Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC 42), 1990, 375-78
  • minorityA fold or crease in the bride's dress, motivated by the cloth-stain sense available to the paired word for spot, by the broad range of Latin ruga, and by fuller's-cloth imagery.; Matthew Henry, Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (Ephesians)

What scholars say about rhutis

Outside the New Testament the word is univocal for a wrinkle of aging skin. LSJ glosses it only as "pucker, wrinkle" (Aristophanes, Plutus 1051; Plato, Symposium 190e, 191a), and BDAG registers only "wrinkle, esp. on the face," citing Aristophanes, Plato, Plutarch, Lucian, and Philo (Sacr. 25). The cognate verb rhutidoo ("to wrinkle, shrivel") extends the field to skin, viscera, and, in medical and botanical writers such as Dioscorides, to shrivelling fruit and bark. The etymology from ruo/eruo ("draw together, contract") yields the base image of something puckered tight. Neither the noun nor the verb occurs in the Septuagint (Hatch-Redpath lists none), so the term has no direct Greek-Old-Testament pedigree and receives no TDNT article and only minimal EDNT/NIDNTTE treatment; Louw-Nida places it at 79.59 ("Features of Objects: Spotted, Spotless"), alongside spilos and deliberately separated from the cultic amomos at 79.60. The critical commentary tradition on Ephesians is essentially unanimous that the Ephesian wrinkle is a bodily one within nuptial imagery drawn from Ezekiel 16: so Barth (AB 34A), Hoehner, Lincoln (WBC 42), O'Brien (Pillar), Thielman (BECNT), Arnold (ZECNT), Bruce (NICNT), Best (ICC), Schnackenburg, Fowl (NTL), and Muddiman (BNTC). Best and Lincoln note the incongruity that a young bride would not have wrinkles and read the phrase as hyperbole for perfect youthful beauty; Barth, Hoehner, and Isaac T. Soon ("Christ's Cosmetic Hydrotherapy," Biblical Interpretation 32.3 [2024]: 288-312) press the first-century cosmetic and medical background more literally. J. P. Sampley (SNTSMS 16, 1971) grounds the synthetic reading of the nuptial and sacrificial imagery. The garment-fold reading survives in homiletical and paraphrase traditions (Matthew Henry; ISV) but has no lexical support in Greek, where cloth-folds are named by ptuche, ptux, or rhusos, not by this word; the wide range of Latin ruga (skin and cloth alike) does not map onto it.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. ῥυτίςlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. ῥυτίςlexicon
  • Louw & Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 79.59lexicon
  • Markus Barth, Ephesians 4-6 (Anchor Bible 34A), 1974commentary
  • Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker), 2002, 754-56commentary
  • Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC 42), 1990, 375-78commentary
  • Ernest Best, Ephesians (ICC), 1998commentary
  • Isaac T. Soon, "Christ's Cosmetic Hydrotherapy: Blemishes, Wrinkles, and Transformational Waters in Ephesians 5:26-27," Biblical Interpretation 32.3 (2024): 288-312article
  • J. P. Sampley, "And the Two Shall Become One Flesh": A Study of Traditions in Ephesians 5:21-33 (SNTSMS 16), 1971monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of ῥυτίς

accusative f s

ῥυτίδα

Eph 5:27