Bible Strands
Matthew 27:25
All the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — All the people answer Pilate at the moment he declares himself innocent of Jesus’s death and shifts responsibility to the crowd.
The words — The Greek αἷμα (haima) literally means blood, functioning here as a legal formula of accepted liability.
The thread — This language echoes the covenantal liability formula in Joshua 2:19 and parallels the crowd’s later accusations against Peter in Acts 5:28 and Stephen’s indictment in Acts 7:52.
Why it lands — The text records a public acceptance of responsibility for a death, requiring the reader to recognize the legal weight of the statement without assuming theological conclusions about divine judgment or collective guilt.
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
Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.
Cross-references
- Joshua 2:19 If anyone goes out the door of your house into the street, his blood will be on his own head, and we will be innocent. But if a hand is laid on anyone with you in the house, his blood will be on our heads.
- Acts 5:28 “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us responsible for this man’s blood.”
- Acts 7:52 Which of the prophets did your fathers fail to persecute? They even killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One. And now you are His betrayers and murderers—
- Deuteronomy 19:10 Thus innocent blood will not be shed in the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, so that you will not be guilty of bloodshed.
- 1 Thessalonians 2:15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets and drove us out as well. They are displeasing to God and hostile to all men,
- Numbers 35:33 Do not pollute the land where you live, for bloodshed pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land on which the blood is shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.
- Matthew 23:30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’
- 1 Kings 2:32 The LORD will bring his bloodshed back upon his own head, for without the knowledge of my father David he struck down two men more righteous and better than he when he put to the sword Abner son of Ner, commander of Israel’s army, and Amasa son of Jether, commander of Judah’s army.
- Psalms 109:12 May there be no one to extend kindness to him, and no one to favor his fatherless children.
- Hebrews 10:28 Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.