One Shall Be Taken and the Other Left: What Does It Mean?

Two people are working side by side. One is taken. The other is left. Most people have been told what that means long before they ever read the sentence that comes immediately before it.

Here is the honest answer. The text does not say where the taken person goes, and the two main readings send that person in opposite directions. On the popular reading, being taken is being gathered to Christ and being left is being abandoned to what follows. On the reading that stays closest to the surrounding paragraph, being taken is being swept away in judgement and being left is being spared. This is one of the rare places where the interpretation most people have heard is not the one the immediate context most obviously supports, and where some of the sharpest arguments against the popular reading come from inside the movement that made it popular.

The verses

Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Matthew 24:40-41

Luke has a close parallel in a different setting, with a bed instead of a field and one extra detail at the end that matters a great deal.

The sentence before it

Whatever these verses mean, they are the second half of a comparison, not a standalone announcement. Jesus has just said this.

And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Matthew 24:39

In the flood picture, the people who are taken away are the people who drown. Noah and his household are the ones left. If the comparison is being carried straight through into verse 40, then to be taken is to be lost and to be left is to survive.

That is the whole case for the judgement reading in one paragraph, and it is a strong one, because Jesus supplies the comparison himself and then says "so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" before moving to the two in the field.

The three verbs

The Greek does not settle the argument, but it is worth seeing what is actually there, because both sides quote it.

Two things follow. First, Jesus does not use the same verb in verse 39 and verse 40. Those who read the taking as rescue lean on that gap: if he meant the flood kind of taking, he had the flood word available and did not use it. Those who read it as judgement answer that the verbs are not synonyms doing the same job, and that Matthew has simply chosen the more precise word for a person being led away rather than water sweeping debris.

Second, paralambano itself is neutral. Jesus uses it in John 14:3 when he says he will come again and receive believers to himself, which is about as positive as the word gets. Matthew uses it in Matthew 27:27 when the governor's soldiers take Jesus into the common hall to mock and scourge him, and in Matthew 12:45 of an unclean spirit taking seven worse spirits with it. The word tells you that someone was taken along by someone. It does not tell you by whom, or to what.

Aphiemi is equally neutral. It is the ordinary word for leaving something where it stands. Being left is not, by itself, either a rescue or an abandonment.

The question the disciples asked

Luke records something Matthew does not. After the same saying, the disciples ask a follow-up.

And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said unto them, Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together. Luke 17:37

The word rendered "eagles" is aetoi, which in this kind of saying is usually understood as vultures, since eagles are not carrion birds. The picture is birds circling a corpse.

If the disciples are asking "taken where?" then the answer is grim, and this is the single strongest piece of evidence for the judgement reading. Those who take the other view answer that the disciples may be asking where the whole event happens rather than where the people go, and that the saying works as a proverb: when the moment arrives it will be as obvious as birds over a body. Matthew has the same proverb earlier, at 24:28, where it sits next to a warning about false messiahs in the desert, which suits the "you will not be able to miss it" sense.

Neither answer disposes of the other.

The case for taken as gathered

The rescue reading is not built mainly on these two verses. It is built on a wider argument and then applied here.

It runs like this. Paul describes believers being caught up to meet the Lord in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Jesus promises in John 14:3 to receive his own to himself, using this same verb. Matthew 24:31 has angels gathering the elect from the four winds only a few verses earlier, which is a taking that is plainly good. Read verses 40 and 41 against that gathering rather than against the flood, and the taken are the gathered.

Advocates also point out that the flood comparison in verses 37 to 39 is explicitly about unawareness, not about direction of travel. On that reading Jesus drops the Noah picture at the end of verse 39 and starts a new illustration about two people whose outward lives look identical.

If you want the full argument about the caught-up passage in Paul and the four positions on its timing, that is a separate question, set out in is the rapture in the Bible.

Who actually holds what

The alignment here is not what most readers expect.

Thomas Ice and Stanley Toussaint are the surprise on that list. Both are dispensationalists who hold a pre-tribulation rapture, and both argue that these particular verses describe judgement, not the rapture, on the grounds that Matthew 24 is about the second coming and that paralambano carries a threatening sense in Matthew's own usage. Arno Gaebelein, an earlier dispensational writer, said the same. So the split does not run neatly along the line between rapture believers and everyone else. It runs through the middle of the rapture camp as well.

D. A. Carson, in his commentary on Matthew, treats the question as neither clear nor especially important to the argument of the passage, which is a defensible response to a case this evenly balanced.

The verse that may not belong

One footnote worth knowing. Luke 17:36, "Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left", is missing from the earliest Greek manuscripts, including P75, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Most textual scholars think a copyist added it from Matthew 24:40. The 1611 King James edition carried a margin note saying it was wanting in most Greek copies. Nothing in the argument depends on it, but it is why your Bible may skip from verse 35 to verse 37.

What both sides do with it

Notice what Jesus says next, because it is the same on either reading.

Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. Matthew 24:42

The saying is not offered as a map. It is offered as a reason to be ready, and the two people in the field are identical from the outside. That is the point that survives the disagreement intact, and every reading of the passage arrives at it.

Which is worth remembering when the verse is used to sort other people into columns. It was given to sort the listener.

The wider question is what the whole discourse is doing: which signs Jesus named, in what order, and how four different traditions of reading trace them. That is the frame this verse sits inside, and it is the frame that decides how it lands.