ἐγκεντρίζω

From the study of Romans 11:17

Range of meaning

A technical horticultural word meaning to graft: to cut into a host plant and insert a scion (a foreign shoot) so that it joins the host and lives off it. It is built from kentron, "point, prick, goad," so the picture is of making a cut or puncture and setting something into it. In the New Testament it appears only in Romans 11:17–24 (six times).

Against the English

Every major English version says "grafted (in)." The word is accurate, but many modern readers have never grafted a tree. They can miss how violent and how dependent the process is: the host is cut open, and the inserted shoot has no roots of its own.

Used elsewhere in the period

Used by Greek writers on plants (BDAG cites Aristotle and Theophrastus) for grafting. The Latin agricultural writers describe the same practice with olives. Columella, On Agriculture 5.9.16, recommends boring into an olive that bears poorly and inserting a green wild-olive slip to revive it, and Palladius gives similar advice. Normally, though, growers put cultivated shoots onto wild rootstock, which is why Paul calls his own picture "contrary to nature" in verse 24. A much later rabbinic tradition (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 63a) uses grafting for Gentile converts too: God tells Abraham he has "two goodly shoots to graft onto you," Ruth the Moabite and Naamah the Ammonite.