Passage

Ephesians 6.1

Book: Ephesians · ASV

Immediate context (±2 verses)

ASV (ASV)

"1. Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right."

"2. Honor thy father and mother (which is the first commandment with promise), 3. that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth." (Ephesians 6:1-3, ASV)

WEB (WEB)

"1. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right."

"2. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise: 3. “that it may be well with you, and you may live long on the earth.”" (Ephesians 6:1-3, WEB)

KJV (KJV)

"1. Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right."

"2. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) 3. That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth." (Ephesians 6:1-3, KJV)

YLT (YLT)

"1. The children! obey your parents in the Lord, for this is righteous;"

"2. honour thy father and mother, 3. which is the first command with a promise, 'That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live a long time upon the land.'" (Ephesians 6:1-3, YLT)

Setting

Speaker: Paul (Ephesians is Pauline; some modern scholars dispute, but Pauline-authorship is the historic and majority-evangelical reading)
Audience: the Ephesian believers (and likely a circular-letter audience across Asia Minor)
Location: composed during Paul's Roman imprisonment, c. AD 60-62
Time period: mid-first-century; one of the four "prison epistles" (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon)

Theological reading

Ephesians 6:1 opens the children-section of the Pauline household-code (Eph 5:21-6:9), the most-developed of the NT household-code passages. The verse must be read in the structural context of Eph 5:21's framing: "subjecting yourselves [hypotassomenoi] one to another in the fear of Christ", the mutual-submission-out-of-reverence-for-Christ is the overarching principle under which every specific instruction operates.

The verbal density of Eph 5:21-6:9: hypotassomenoi (5:21, mutual submission) → hypotassesthō (5:24, wives) → hypakouete (6:1, children) → hypakouete (6:5, servants). The household-code deploys both hypotassō (positional ordering) and hypakouō (active obedience). The shift from hypotassō to hypakouō at 6:1 is significant: children's relation to parents is framed as active-obedience rather than merely positional-submission, reflecting both the developmental-formation context (children are being-formed through their obedience) and the parallel with the slave-master pair at 6:5 (which also takes hypakouō).

The qualifying clauses do critical work: "in the Lord" (en Kyriō) grounds the obedience Christologically, children obey parents because they obey Christ; the parental authority is under Christ's authority, not autonomous. "For this is right" (touto gar estin dikaion) anchors the command in the moral-natural-order; the fifth commandment (Exod 20:12; Deut 5:16) is cited explicitly in v. 2 as "the first commandment with promise." The instruction is not an arbitrary Pauline command but the canonical-creational moral pattern.

The reciprocal qualifier at v. 4, "fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord", is essential to the proper-relational-ethic reading. The child's obedience is not license for parental abuse; the parent's authority is not unconditional. The household-code commands flow from the mutual-submission framing of 5:21 in both directions.

Patristic and Reformed engagement of the passage emphasizes (a) the fifth commandment as the bridge between the first table (duties to God) and the second table (duties to neighbor); (b) parental authority as derivative from God's authority, with the en Kyriō limiting principle ruling out obedience to unrighteous parental commands; (c) the formation-of-virtue logic, the child's hypakouō of parents-under-God forms the disposition toward hypakouō of Christ.

Key words

G5219 - hypakouo, the verbal cognate hypakouō (G5219), here in the imperative hypakouete ("obey!"). The same verb governs the slave-master pair at Eph 6:5; the parallel Colossian construction at Col 3:20, 22.

Quoted in

G5219 - hypakouo

Why these four translations

ris3n chose ASV, WEB, KJV, and YLT for two reasons together. They are the most literal English translations available (formal-equivalence: word-for-word renderings that preserve the Hebrew and Greek grammar rather than smoothing it into modern dynamic-equivalence idiom). And they are in the public domain in the United States, which means fair-use quotation at any length requires no publisher license. Modern licensed translations (NASB95, ESV, NIV) restrict volume of quotation under their copyright terms, so they are not used at stub-level coverage here. NASB95 appears only on hand-curated rich passage hubs under Lockman Foundation's fair-use allowance.

The four:

ASV (American Standard Version, 1901). The basis of the modern critical-text English tradition.
WEB (World English Bible, contemporary). Public-domain revision in the ASV line, in current English.
KJV (King James Version, 1611). Reformation-era, Textus Receptus base.
YLT (Young's Literal Translation, Robert Young, 1862). Hyper-literal preservation of Hebrew and Greek grammar; useful for word-study work even where English reads stiff.

See Bibles for the full per-translation history, translators, textual basis, strengths, and weaknesses.