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 5:25
Husbands, love your wives. The word is agape, and the word you would expect is the one that is missing.
Ephesians 5:25, in every translation this tool compares.
You are writing a wedding card and you have two words available, one for wanting someone and one for standing by them. You pick one. The choice is the message. A reader with both words sees which you left out. A reader with only one word cannot.
Because it is the central New Testament command about marriage, and the interesting thing is a word that is absent rather than present. You cannot see an absence in English, so this is a case you would never find on your own no matter how carefully you read.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.
Every English version reads love, because there is only one word to use. The choice Paul made is invisible in English.
ἀγαπάω agapao · G25
The verb is agapate, from agapao. Paul is writing about marriage, the one relationship where a Greek writer had eros available and might be expected to use it, and he does not. He reaches for the word he uses for God's love and then defines it in the same sentence by Christ giving himself up.
English love covers desire and commitment with one word, so the fact that Paul declined one of them cannot be seen. In Greek the absence is loud. In English there is no absence, because there was never a second word to leave out.
When a Greek writer had more than one word available and picked a specific one, the choice is the argument. You cannot see that in English, but you can look for the places where the obvious word would have been a different one.
There is no translation dispute. There is a reading dispute about how much weight to put on the word choice, and the answer depends on whether Paul had a genuine alternative. Here he did.
- Eros does not appear in the New Testament, so the contrast is real rather than imagined
- The same verb governs the whole passage, Ephesians 5:25, 28, 33
