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 12:10
Two Greek words for love welded into one, and English has to pick a phrase.
Romans 12:10, in every translation this tool compares.
English glues words together too. Homesick is not a home and a sickness, it is one idea that needed two words to build. When you meet a glued word, take it apart and ask why those two.
Because it is the only place in the New Testament where two of the love-words are fused into a single term, which makes it the one verse that proves the vocabulary distinctions are real rather than invented by preachers. Everything else in the verse is ordinary.
Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another.
Modern versions read be devoted to one another in brotherly love, or love one another with brotherly affection.
φιλόστοργος philostorgos · G5387
Kindly affectioned is philostorgos, a compound of philos and storge. Brotherly love is philadelphia. The verse stacks the love you pick on top of the love you are born into and tells a congregation to treat each other as both.
English has no compound for this and no word for storge at all, so every version has to build a phrase. Kindly affectioned, devoted, affection: all of them are attempts to say family-feeling-toward-people-you-chose in words English does not have.
Compound words are where a language shows you what it thinks goes together. When your translation reaches for a two-word phrase and a footnote, check whether the Greek was one word.
Nothing textual is in question. The renderings differ in how much of the family sense they try to carry, and devoted carries the least of it.
- The only occurrence of philostorgos in the New Testament
- Compare philadelphia in the same verse, and at Hebrews 13:1; 1 Thessalonians 4:9
