gamos

In the New Testament this word almost always means a wedding in the sense of the celebration itself, the days of feasting that a marriage set off. In the ancient world a wedding was not a single ceremony of an hour but a party that could run for a week or two, with food, wine, guests, and a procession bringing the couple home. That festival is what the word names. This is why the plural form (something like "the festivities") turns up so often: it does not mean several separate weddings but the many days and acts of one celebration, the same way older English could speak of a person's "nuptials." Readers who see the plural in the parables should not picture more than one wedding.

The famous scenes trade on this festive picture. Jesus turns water into wine at a village wedding in Cana when the host has run out, a social disaster at a feast. He tells of a king who throws a wedding banquet for his son and sends servants to gather guests, and of bridesmaids waiting late into the night for the groom to arrive and lead everyone into the celebration. In each case the point rides on what a wedding feast was: an occasion of joy you dared not miss and dared not treat lightly.

Behind this lies a long habit in the Old Testament and Jewish writings of picturing God's final salvation as a great feast, and specifically as a wedding. So when the parables speak of a wedding banquet, and when Revelation announces "the wedding of the Lamb has come" and calls people blessed who are invited to "the wedding supper," the everyday festival becomes an image of the kingdom of God itself: the joy of being welcomed to God's table at the end. The word keeps its plain meaning, a wedding celebration, while carrying that larger hope.

One New Testament passage uses the word in a different way, not for the wedding party but for marriage as a settled arrangement to be honored. The letter to the Hebrews urges that marriage be held in honor by everyone and that the marriage bed be kept pure, warning against sexual immorality and adultery. Here the word points to the institution of marriage itself, the ongoing relationship, rather than to any celebration.

This was a normal use of the word in ordinary Greek; it could name either the feast or the married state, and everyday documents from the period use it for both. The New Testament writers simply drew on whichever sense the sentence needed. In this one verse the surrounding words about faithfulness and the marriage bed make clear it is the institution, not the festival, that is in view.