---
title: Hebrews 5:7
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/hebrews-5-7/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/hebrews-5-7.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Hebrews 5:7
testament: NT
section: Letters
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Hebrews 5:7

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> During the days of Jesus’ earthly life, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the One who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence.

## NWT Wording of the Key Phrase

- NWT (2013 revision): "During his life on earth, Christ offered up supplications and also petitions, with strong outcries and tears, to the One who was able to save him out of death, and he was favorably heard for his godly fear."

## JW Usage

Read as evidence that Jesus was a dependent creature — he prayed, he wept, he needed to be saved from death, and he was heard because of his godly fear. A being who must petition someone else for rescue is taken to be plainly less than Almighty God.

## Protestant Usage

Grant the humanity entirely and without hedging. Jesus really prayed, really wept, really recoiled from what was coming. Any account of him that makes this play-acting is wrong, and Christians have said so since the earliest centuries. The answer is that the person praying is one person with two natures. The praying, the tears and the need belong to the human nature he took; they do not tell you what he was before he took it. Philippians 2 gives the framework in their own Bible: existing in God's form, he took a slave's form — took, not exchanged. This verse also matters for the temptation question. The distress here is real, which is what makes Hebrews 4:15 meaningful — tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin. Real pressure does not require the possibility of failure. A doctor watching an operation he is forbidden to join feels the pull genuinely. And James 1:13 says God cannot be tempted by evil. The Watchtower needs Jesus temptable enough to ransom and stable enough never to fail; those requirements meet only in someone fully human and fully divine. Compare James 1:13, Hebrews 5:1.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- [Tempted in Every Way — Yet Could Not Fail](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/jesus-tempted-yet-impeccable.md) — Hebrews 4:15 / James 1:13 [Deity of Christ]