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.
The four loves
Four Greek words for love, and two of them never appear in the New Testament.
English has one word for uncle. Your mother's brother and your father's brother get the same label. Plenty of languages split those, and speakers of those languages find it strange that you do not. Greek splits love the way those languages split uncle. English does not, and the split is invisible to you until someone points at it.
Because this is the most repeated piece of Greek vocabulary in popular Christian teaching, and half of it is not in the New Testament. Knowing which half, and why the absences are interesting rather than embarrassing, is the difference between using the scheme and being used by it.
No English version can show any of this. English has one word, and it is doing the work of four.
ἀγάπη agape · G26 / φιλία philia · G5373 / στοργή storge (compounds only) / ἔρως eros (absent)
The four-loves scheme is real Greek vocabulary, but it is not a New Testament vocabulary set. It is C. S. Lewis's framework from The Four Loves, published in 1960, built out of classical Greek. Eros does not occur in the New Testament at all. Storge never occurs as a standalone noun or verb; it survives only inside two compounds, astorgos in Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3, and philostorgos in Romans 12:10. That leaves philia and agape doing nearly all the work.
English has one noun and one verb for all of it. A language with four words can distinguish the love you did not choose from the love you did, and the love that wants from the love that stays, without ever explaining itself. English has to explain itself every time, or leave it ambiguous.
Learn the four as four verbs, not four nouns. Born into, picked, reaches, stays. Then hold them loosely, because two of them are not in your New Testament and the other two overlap more than the sermons admit.
Nothing to choose, because no translator has the option. The thing worth noticing is what the absences say. A body of literature that never once uses the word for desire, and only ever names family affection by its absence, is not a body of literature indifferent to either. It has simply put its weight somewhere else. The word it reaches for when it commands a husband to love his wife is not eros. It is agape.
- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960), the source of the scheme, in your books vault
- Eros: no occurrence in the Greek New Testament in any form
- Storge: no standalone occurrence; astorgos at Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3, philostorgos at Romans 12:10
- The concept eros names is affirmed without the word: 1 Corinthians 7:5; Hebrews 13:4
