"Your wife" or "your own wife"? [closed]

Solution 1:

"Your own wife" is an expression which adds emphasis to the word your.

Since the Bible is filled with exhortations for a husband to love his wife, to be faithful to his wife, and to "cleave to" his wife (see Genesis 2:24 KJV), combining the word own with the word your emphasizes the importance of fidelity to one's own wife.

To own, of course, does not mean to possess, as you would a chattel; rather, it denotes a term of endearment, preciousness, exclusiveness, and even pride. Take the following sentence, for example:

Helen is my own wife, not someone else's, and I'll love her until the day I die.

Solution 2:

What is the difference, if any, between "your wife" and "your own wife"?

You use "your own" when you want to distinguish it from someone else's - esp. your own, for example:

Get your own fries and stop eating mine.

or:

Mind your own business.

which actually means don't meddle in mine.

The latter is used in the bible.

First, there is no such thing as the bible (in English). There are more than 450 translations of the bible into English ¹.

Next, the phrase "your own wife" seems to appear only in The Good News Translation version of Proverbs 5:15:

Be faithful to your own wife and give your love to her alone.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+5%3A15&version=GNT

Now, the thing is that this is not a translation at all. The same verse in the King James Version reads:

Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+5%3A15&version=KJV

which is close to the original Hebrew.

So clearly the expression "Be faithful to your own wife" quoted above is a paraphrase of the original verse. And it is concerned not with fidelity (be faithful to your wife) but rather with adultery (do not drink water out of the cisterns of others).

Replace the euphemism "be faithful" with another word conveying the original meaning, and you will see why it's necessary to say "your own wife" rather than just "your wife".

P.S: Further search reveals two additional occurrences of "your own wife", both in the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation:

9 Why then have you despised the command of the Lord by doing what I consider evil? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife as your own wife—you murdered him with the Ammonite’s sword. 10 Now therefore, the sword will never leave your house because you despised Me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own wife.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel+12&version=HCSB

I don't think these require any explanation regarding the use of "own".