Mar 7:10 For Moses said, Honour your father and your mother; and, Who curses his father or mother, let him die the death:

Christ combines two old testament verses here, Deu 5:16 and Exd 21:17. His purpose is to offer a contrast of ideas, in this case, life versus death. Christ contrasts the honor due your parents for giving you life with the deadly effects of speaking evil of your parents. This contrast is typical of Christ's teaching of the Old testament.

In the Greek, there is an odd correspondence between the verbs used for "honor" and "die." The former means "value" and the later can also mean "to accomplish" in the sense of finishing a task. In the Greek, I am left with the sense that those who speak evil of their parents are honoring the accomplishment of death over the accomplishment of life. This wordplay only works in Greek.

However, there is similar contrast in the original Hebrew, which is interesting as well. The term for "honor" means "to be heavy." Here the contrast that is brought to mind is between the heaviness of birth and the heaviness of death.

On the continuing theme of the mistranslation of "good" and "evil" in the NT, here we see one of the rare references to the Greek word that actually does mean "evil," kakos, which appears in the compound, kakologeô, to speak evil. As we like to point out, despite the fondness of the English translators for the word "evil," the Greek of the NT seldom uses this Greek term that means "evil." The term usually translated as "evil" actually is closer in meaning to "worthless,"
base," and "second-rate."

(Note: The Greek and Hebrew versions of "die the death" are a little different and, interestingly, the English translation here is closer to the Hebrew, something we don't see very often. The Hebrew phrase repeats the verb muwth with its infinitive, meaning something like "kill dead" while the Greek version from the Septuagint uses to different verbs and is closer to "make dead," but the ideas are the same. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Christ was raised in Egypt, where Alexandria was the center of Jewish culture and where the Septuagint was written a few centuries before Christ. If he taught in Greek as well as Aramaic, he would have quoted from the Septuagint version, but, of course, the authors of the New Testament might also have referred to the Septuagint in translating Christ's words from Aramaic as well. )

"Honour" is from the Greek timaô , (timao) which means "to revere," "to honor," and "to value." In the original Hebrew, it is from kabad, which means "to be heavy," "to be rich," and "to be honored." Though the Greek word doesn't have the same sense of "weight" as the Hebrew, weight is often connected in Greek with value. In a commodity based society, value and weight were the same. We say that we give "weight" to an arguments in the same sense that the ancients would give "weight" to the rules of a leader or a God.

"Curse" is from kakologeô (kakologeo), which means "revile" and "abuse." It is a compound of the word that means "bad" and "evil" kakos (kakos) and the word logos (logos), which means "word," "computation," "reckoning," and "value."

"Die" is from teleutaô (teleutao), which means "to bring to pass," "to accomplish," "to finish," "to die," "to end a life," and "to make an end to life." The word in Hebew is from muwth, which means "to die" and "to kill."

"Death" is from thanatos (thanatos), which means "death" "a death sentence," and "a corpse." However, the word could be a form of the verb, thanatoô, which is the future passive of the verb meaning "to be put to death," "to be made dead." The word in Hebew is from muwth, which means "to die" and "to kill."