The Words Translated “Love”

The familiar claim about the Greek words deserves to be heard in its strongest and kindest form. In Greek, it says, there are different words for love. Phileo is brotherly love, the warm but conditional affection of human friends. Agape is the highest love, the divine and unconditional love of God that expects nothing in return. So when the Bible uses agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay, the word itself lifts the sentence into the realm of God. And from there: “We need not keep commandments; we need only love with agape.”

Something in it is precious, because love really does stand at the heart of Scripture. Book 2 of this series showed Paul gathering the whole Torah into the single command to love your neighbor as yourself, and nothing here moves an inch from that. And anyone who has known the love of God knows that it is higher than anything we deserve.

Yet this beautiful teaching, preached with real conviction, makes two promises about words. It promises that agape is always a holy love, and it promises that phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o is always a lesser one. Both are claims about the Bible’s vocabulary, and claims of that kind can be checked by gathering the places where the words stand and seeing how the writers used them.

How Words Get Their Meanings

Those who write dictionaries do not decide in advance what a word ought to mean. They collect sentences. They gather the places where a word is used, lay those sentences side by side, and let the uses tell them what the word means. If a word turns up in a hundred sentences, the definition has to fit all hundred, not only a favorite three.

The same method serves well with the Bible. Before deciding what agape means, it is worth taking out every word that Scripture uses for love, and looking at all of them together.

The Words on the Table

Here are the Greek words of the New Testament and the Hebrew words of the Old, with the number of times each appears as counted in the YLV.

Four things stand out from this table.

What the Table Shows

The first is that the agape family is by far the largest. The verb agapao (ἀγαπάω), to love, appears 142 times; the noun agape (ἀγάπη), love, 116 times; and agapetos, beloved, 62 times. When the New Testament speaks of love, this is the word it uses most often. Agape is not a rare word kept for special occasions. It is the ordinary, everyday word for love in the Greek of the New Testament.

The second is that the phileo family is smaller, but it is far from small. The verb phileo (φιλέω), to hold dear, appears 25 times, philos, friend, 30 times, and philia, friendship, once. Beside these stand some twenty compound words built on phil-, and nearly every one of them names something a person loves: brothers, strangers, money, self, pleasure. Those compounds turn out to say a great deal about what a love is.

The third is that two Greek words for love which many people have heard about are missing. Eros, the word for passionate desire, does not appear once in the New Testament. And storge, the word the Greeks used for the natural affection of a family, never appears by itself. It is found only inside two compounds. One of them is negative.

Romans 1:31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful —

The word translated “unloving” is astorgos, without natural affection. It stands among the marks of people who have turned away from God, and it comes back in Paul’s description of the last days in 2 Timothy 3:3. The other compound is positive.

Romans 12:10 devoted to one another in brotherly love, giving preference to one another in honor;

The words “devoted to one another” translate philostorgos, family affection joined to phil-, and the verse also calls this “brotherly love,” philadelphia. So the Greek word for family love shows up in the New Testament only as part of other words. The writers had a whole range of Greek words for love to choose from, and they built nearly everything they said about it on two families, agape and phileo.

The fourth is the Hebrew side. The Old Testament has several words for love, but one of them does most of the work: ahav (אָהַב), to love, with its noun ahavah. The verb appears 209 times and the noun 40 times. It is the word for loving God and for loving a neighbor and a stranger, and it is also used for loves that are anything but holy.

Beside it stand words that are not the same as ahav. Chesed (חֶסֶד), with 247 occurrences, is steadfast covenant love, the loyal kindness that keeps faith within a covenant. The verb racham, to have compassion, and the noun rachamim, compassion, are related to the word for the womb, and they name the tender compassion of a mother for the child she carried. When Scripture says that God has racham on His people, it does not describe a distant pity but a love that comes from the deepest place. The remaining words, dod, yedid, ra’yah and chashaq, are words for the beloved, the dear one, the companion, and for being drawn to someone with strong desire.

The missing words matter more than it first seems. The familiar teaching about the kinds of love usually sets out four Greek words, eros, storge, phileo and agape, as if the New Testament had chosen carefully among them and given each its own rank. Yet two of those four are words the New Testament does not use on their own at all. Whatever ranking is built on them is not built on the way the apostles wrote. To learn what the apostles meant by love, the place to start is the words they actually used, in the sentences where they used them.

What the Table Does Not Show

There is no column on the table marked “holy” and no column marked “unholy.” The Bible did not set aside one word for God’s love and another for human love. It did not reserve a sacred word that could only be poured out on good things.

Instead, Scripture speaks about love with a small number of ordinary words and uses them constantly, so the meaning of any particular love is not decided by which of these words was chosen. Something else decides it.

The word does not make a love holy. What a person loves, and whether that person keeps the commandments of God, decides what that love is.

That is a large claim, and it has to be tested against the text. The first half of that teaching can be tested quickly. If agape is always a holy love, then the New Testament should never use it for loving something evil. A few verses settle the question, and the first of them stands three verses after the best-known verse in the Gospel of John.