Love in action

The com­ment in the New Amer­ican Bible Revised Edi­tion (NABRE) for 1 Cor 13:4-7 reads

“The Greek con­tains fif­teen verbs; it is nat­ural to trans­late many of them by adjec­tives in English”

That got me intrigued. Verbs are great, they’re where the action is. Love does not just have beau­tiful attrib­utes, no: God’s love, the very reason cre­ation exists, is working in us and through us. So it would make sense if a deeper under­standing could be gar­nered from looking at these char­ac­ter­is­tics as agents of change, pow­erful, trans­for­ma­tional inner and outer workings.

In my Hebrew studies, I’m always fas­ci­nated how basi­cally all words have a three-letter verbal root, a con­crete action that all other mean­ings stem from. This reg­u­larly leads to having my mind blown. Just some examples:

• the root of “for­ever” is the verb “to conceal”!
• Craving (תָּאַב ‹ta’ab›) can be greedy or yearning, depending on what it is directed at, e.g. meat in Num 11:4 or God’s Torah in Psalm 119:20;
• “instruc­tion” is a much better term for Torah, rather than “law”. חֹק ‹choq› is a law or statute, and it comes from חָקַק ‹chakak› to grave in or inscribe;
• the con­cept of חָ֫סֶד ‹chesed› has much more to do with grace, devo­tion and fierce loy­alty, rather than “mercy”;
• a “wonder” – פֶּ֫לֶא ‹pelei› – is some­thing sep­a­rate (from the phys­ical world), some­thing remark­able and distinguished…

For embarking on a journey of Hebrew dis­covery of the scrip­tures, I cannot rec­om­mend warmly enough the Holy Lan­guage Insti­tute.

But back to Ancient Greek, where­with I’ll have to go with the inter­linear trans­la­tion, even though I find some of its inter­pre­ta­tions, of Hebrew at least, strange and not very reli­able. First point to note, that this is talking about ἀγάπη ‹Agape› here, not Phileo, Stergo or Eros – see this forth­right article for an excel­lent sum­mary of these four words. In the King James Bible, Agape actu­ally gets trans­lated “Charity” rather than “Love”. This is working, engaged, benef­i­cent love, not a feeling of asso­ci­a­tion or friend­ship, not erotic attrac­tion or infat­u­a­tion. All the more fit­ting that we should work at this kind of Love’s inner work­ings and outer actions!

 

Here is an overview of those 15 actions

that turn out to be 16, when including the first bit of verse 8.

(I put a table in this page first but it burst its banks).

 

Overall I would def­i­nitely say that the depth of meaning in those Greek verbs widens or even alters the per­cep­tion of the usual trans­la­tions. It is good to go deep into these mean­ings, because it is good to under­stand and med­i­tate upon just how, and how much, our Cre­ator loves us, and con­se­quen­tially, how we can love one another.