Bible Strands
1 Corinthians 5:8
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old bread, leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and of truth.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — Paul addresses the Corinthian congregation, which has tolerated a member's incestuous union (5:1), and he pivots from the command to purge (v. 7) to a practical standard for communal life.
The words — ζύμῃ (zumē), "leaven," is the load-bearing noun: in the Passover ritual it is the physical agent of fermentation, and here it names the moral residue that persists when a community fails to act. The pairing with παλαιᾷ (palaia), "old," ties the word back to v. 7's "old leaven" and marks it as what must already have been removed.
The thread — The Passover unleavened-bread command in Exodus 12:15 and Deuteronomy 16:3 supplies the ritual frame Paul redeploys; 1 Peter 2:1 echoes the same moral vocabulary (malice, deceit) in a post-baptismal context.
Why it lands — The verse makes communal ethics a matter of what a group tolerates rather than what individuals confess; "sincerity and truth" are not internal dispositions but the visible condition of a community that has actually removed the leaven.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Greek words
King James Version
Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Cross-references
- 1 Peter 2:1 Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander.
- Exodus 12:15 For seven days you must eat unleavened bread. On the first day you are to remove the leaven from your houses. Whoever eats anything leavened from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel.
- Deuteronomy 16:3 You must not eat leavened bread with it; for seven days you are to eat with it unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, because you left the land of Egypt in haste—so that you may remember for the rest of your life the day you left the land of Egypt.
- Matthew 16:6 “Watch out!” Jesus told them. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
- Mark 8:15 “Watch out!” He cautioned them. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod.”
- Luke 12:1 In the meantime, a crowd of many thousands had gathered, so that they were trampling one another. Jesus began to speak first to His disciples: “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.
- Matthew 16:12 Then they understood that He was not telling them to beware of the leaven used in bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
- John 1:47 When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, He said of him, “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no deceit.”
- 1 Corinthians 5:6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven works through the whole batch of dough?
- 1 Corinthians 6:9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who submit to or perform homosexual acts,