StrongerBible

asebēs

ἀσεβής

GreekG0765“ungodly, godless”

Appears 9 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Rom 4:5Rom 5:61Ti 1:91Pe 4:182Pe 2:52Pe 2:62Pe 3:7Jud 1:4Jud 1:15
Compound of
Alphaα, ἈλφαAlpha4G1
sebomaiσέβομαιbe devout10G4576
Root family
Word studyah-seb-ACEadjective

What asebēs means

godless: giving God none of the reverence he is owed, and living with no regard for his claim

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

Greek built this word by putting "not" in front of the family of words for reverence and worship. It is not a statement about what someone believes. It names what someone withholds: no awe, no worship, no reckoning with God at all. In the wider Greek world that counted as a public offense rather than a private opinion, and the Greek Old Testament took the word over to name the person who lives outside any regard for the God of Israel, the settled opposite of the person who is in the right with him.

In Peter and Jude the word is a verdict already passed, and every time the sentence around it is looking toward judgment.

  • the world of the flood, swept away while Noah and seven others were kept safe
  • Sodom and Gomorrah burned to ashes and set up as a warning of what is coming
  • the present sky and earth, stored up for a day of judgment and ruin
  • the people who slipped quietly into the churches, twisting God's kindness into a license to do as they pleased

Paul turns the same word the other way round and makes it the description of the person God rescues. God is the one who declares the godless to be in the right, and Christ died for the godless while they were still helpless. The shock is deliberate: Israel's own law told a judge never to acquit the guilty, and Paul uses of God the very word that law had used. The two ways of using the word do not disagree about what it means. Both assume this is the person with nothing to plead. They differ only over what God decides to do about that.

Jude stacks the whole word family into one sentence, convicting the godless of the godless things they did in a godless way, and adds the matching noun for the condition itself (ἀσέβεια). The repetition adds no new information, only weight, and that is the point: the word does not label one bad act but a whole way of standing toward God.

Rom 4:5Rom 5:61Ti 1:91Pe 4:182Pe 2:52Pe 2:62Pe 3:7Jud 1:4Jud 1:15

What scholars say about asebēs

The lexicons are unanimous on the sense and give the word a single entry. BDAG defines it as pertaining to violating norms for a proper relation to deity, irreverent, impious, ungodly, and notes that in the New Testament it is almost always substantival. LSJ documents the same value throughout classical Greek, where the cognate noun names an indictable public offense in Attic law, the charge on which Socrates was tried. In the Septuagint the adjective is overwhelmingly the rendering of rasha, with chaneph and other terms for the guilty behind a minority of instances, and Muraoka registers the corresponding shift by which a word for cultic irreverence becomes a general designation of the wicked in opposition to the righteous. Foerster, treating the sebomai family in TDNT, stresses that the negation presupposes a relation that is owed and not merely a failure of belief; EDNT registers the same, noting the fixed pairing of the adjective with hamartolos in New Testament lists. Bauckham (WBC) analyzes the asebeia catchword in Jude, where verse 15 reproduces the fourfold repetition of 1 Enoch 1:9 and supplies the letter's controlling accusation. On Romans 4:5 the commentators (Cranfield, Moo, Jewett) all note that the phrase reverses the Septuagint prohibitions against acquitting the guilty at Exodus 23:7 and Proverbs 17:15, and that Paul's choice of this adjective rather than a milder term is the point of the paradox. At 2 Peter 2:6 the text is divided between the dative plural adjective and an infinitive of the cognate verb; the critical text brackets the disputed letter, and Bauckham reviews the evidence.

Sources

  • BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (2000), s.v. ἀσεβήςlexicon
  • LSJ, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement (1996), s.v. ἀσεβήςlexicon
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Peeters, 2009), s.v. ἀσεβήςlexicon
  • W. Foerster, σέβομαι, εὐσεβής, ἀσεβής κτλ., in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), vol. 7dictionary
  • Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (EDNT), vol. 1, s.v. ἀσεβήςdictionary
  • R. J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Word Biblical Commentary 50, 1983)commentary
  • C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (ICC, 1975), on 4:5commentary
  • D. J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT, 2nd ed. 2018), on 4:5 and 5:6commentary
  • R. Jewett, Romans (Hermeneia, 2007), on 4:5commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of ἀσεβής

genitive m p

ἀσεβῶν

Rom 5:6, 2Pe 2:5, 2Pe 3:7

dative m p

ἀσεβέσιν

1Ti 1:9, 2Pe 2:6

nominative m p

ἀσεβεῖς

Jud 1:4, Jud 1:15

accusative m s

ἀσεβῆ

Rom 4:5

nominative m s

ἀσεβὴς

1Pe 4:18