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.
Romans 1:31; 2 Timothy 3:3
Storge never stands alone in the New Testament. It turns up inside compounds, and the one that names it as missing is the one most readers meet.
Romans 1:31, in every translation this tool compares.
Unfeeling only exists because feeling does. You can learn a lot about what a group valued by which words they only ever use with un in front. Sometimes a language names a thing solely by pointing at its absence.
Because storge has no bare noun in the New Testament at all. It survives only in compounds: astorgos here, where the affection is gone, and philostorgos at Romans 12:10, where Paul tells the church to have it for one another. Learning it tells you something no lexicon entry does: which loves the New Testament names directly, and which it only names when they fail.
Without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.
Modern versions read heartless, or unloving. All of them are rendering one negated word.
ἄστοργος astorgos · G794
Astorgos is storge with an alpha privative in front of it, the Greek equivalent of the English un-. It occurs twice, both times inside a list diagnosing a society. Paul is not saying these people are unfriendly. He is saying the affection that ordinarily holds families together is gone.
English heartless and unloving are general. The Greek is specific: it names the failure of one particular kind of love, the kind nobody chooses and everybody is supposed to have by default.
A word can be present in a text only as a negative, and that is still evidence. When a translation gives you a broad word like heartless, check whether the Greek was negating something narrower.
Without natural affection, the King James rendering, is closer to the Greek and sounds archaic. Heartless is readable and loses the family reference. Both are defensible and the older one is more precise.
- Both occurrences: Romans 1:31; 2 Timothy 3:3
- The alpha privative construction, as in agnostos, apistos, adikos
