For we know renders essentially the same phrase that occurs in 2.2; 3.19; 7.14; 8.28. Generally this expression is used to introduce a fact of common knowledge.

Groans with pain like the pain of childbirth is literally “groans and is in birth pangs.” Each of these verbs has a prefix meaning “with” added to the regular root. Commentators agree that the force of these prefixes is to indicate that the universe is groaning and having pains “in all its parts” (New English Bible), not that it is groaning and having pains “together with us (believers).” The Good News Translation (so also Moffatt, Jerusalem Bible, New American Bible) makes this information implicit without translating the prefixes by a separate word. To translate by “together” as the Revised Standard Version (so also King James Version, An American Translation*) conveys very little meaning. The expression all of creation groans with pain may require certain modifications, not only in focus but also in a shift from metaphor to simile—for example, “all of creation, as it were, has pain and is groaning” or “all of creation groans because it has pain, so to speak.”

Like the pain of childbirth may be rendered as “just like a woman who has pain before giving birth to a child.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1973. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .