Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Ephesians 5:18
Be filled with the Spirit. The Greek is a command to keep being filled, continuously, and by someone else.
Ephesians 5:18, in every translation this tool compares.
Shut the door. Keep shutting the door. English needs a helper word for the second one. Greek does it inside the verb, so a command can carry keep on in its own form. Every English rendering of this verse has to drop that or add words.
Because the verse is the standard text on the filling of the Spirit and the English makes it sound like a transaction you complete once. The parsing is uncontested and invisible, which is the worst combination: nobody argues about it and nobody sees it.
And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit.
English versions all read be filled. Some study Bibles add a note about the present tense. No version can carry it in the text.
πληρόω pleroo · G4137
Plerousthe is present tense, passive voice, imperative mood, second person plural. Present tense in Greek is aspect rather than time: it presents the action as ongoing. Passive means the filling is done to you. Plural means it is addressed to a congregation, not to an individual.
English imperatives have no aspect. Be filled sounds like a single event you perform once. The Greek is nearer to keep on being filled, and English has no way to say that without adding words the original did not have.
Greek tense is mostly about aspect, not time. When a command feels like a one-time transaction in English, check whether the Greek is present, which frames it as a continuing state, or aorist, which frames it as a whole.
There is no disagreement about the parsing. The disagreement is whether to smuggle the aspect into the English, which makes the sentence heavier, or to leave it and lose it. Every version has chosen to lose it.
- Standard Greek grammars on verbal aspect: Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek; Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament
- The contrast with the aorist imperative in the same letter
