StrongerBible

euthus

εὐθύς

GreekG2117straight, right, ...

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 3:3Mrk 1:3Luk 3:4Luk 3:5Act 8:21Act 9:11Act 13:102Pe 2:15
Compound of
Root family
Names & words formed with this
Word studyyoo-THOOSadjective

What euthus means

straight: running without bends or detours, whether it is a road or a life

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The picture behind the word is a line with nothing bent in it. A straight road is the one that gets you there without a detour, and in the ancient world roads really were repaired and straightened ahead of a visiting king. That is the scene Isaiah paints and the first three Gospels quote: fill in the valleys, level the hills, take the kinks out of the road, because someone important is coming.

From roads the word moves easily to people, because a life is often pictured as a road. A straight heart, or a straight way, is one that goes where it says it is going, with no doubling back and no hidden turns. Peter tells Simon in Samaria that his heart is not straight before God, and Paul tells a magician on Cyprus that he has been putting bends in the straight roads of the Lord. English usually switches to "right" or "upright" at that point, which is accurate, though the road quietly disappears.

Two smaller notes. In Acts 9:11 the word has hardened into a place name: the street in Damascus where Paul was staying was simply called Straight. And the noun built from the same root (εὐθύτης) names the quality on its own, uprightness, which is what Hebrews 1:8 says the scepter of God's kingdom is made of.

A different Greek word (ὀρθός) covers standing upright and keeping a path level underfoot. This one is specifically about the absence of bends.

Nuances

1astraight in the plain sense: a road, path, or line with no bends or curves in it
TranslatabilityDirect
Mat 3:3Mrk 1:3Luk 3:4Luk 3:5Act 9:11
1bstraight in conduct: right, honest, going where it claims to go instead of twisting aside
Act 8:21Act 13:102Pe 2:15

What scholars say about euthus

BDAG divides the New Testament usage in two: the literal sense of a straight road or line (Matthew 3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4 and 3:5; the Damascus street named Εὐθεῖα in Acts 9:11), and a figurative extension for what is right or upright (Acts 8:21; 13:10; 2 Peter 2:15). LSJ documents the same range across wider Greek, from geometry and topography to moral rectitude, and EDNT follows the same two-part division for the New Testament. All four Gospel occurrences stand inside the Septuagint wording of Isaiah 40:3 to 40:5, where εὐθύς and its cognate verb render forms of Hebrew יָשָׁר, and that quotation is what carries the road imagery into the moral uses. A lexical caution for corpus work: the frequent Gospel adverb εὐθύς, catalogued under εὐθέως, is formally the adverbial use of this adjective but is temporal in the New Testament, so surface matches must be checked against the morphological tagging rather than the spelling. On Acts 9:11, Fitzmyer identifies the street called Straight with the colonnaded east to west thoroughfare of Roman Damascus.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. εὐθύςlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. εὐθύςlexicon
  • EDNT, s.v. εὐθύςtheological-dictionary
  • Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles, Anchor Yale Biblecommentary

All attested forms of εὐθύς

accusative f p

εὐθείας

Mat 3:3, Mrk 1:3, Luk 3:4, Act 13:10

accusative f s

εὐθεῖαν, εὐθείαν

Act 9:11, 2Pe 2:15, Luk 3:5

nominative f s

εὐθεῖα

Act 8:21