to burn with intense feeling for someone or something: to be zealous or jealously devoted, to set your heart eagerly on it, or, on its dark side, to envy.
The picture behind this word is heat. It grows out of an older word for boiling, and it names one strong feeling, not two: an intense warmth of the heart fixed on something. What makes that heat good or bad is never the word itself but what it is aimed at.
Aimed at something genuinely worth having, it is admirable. It can be an eager reaching after the best gifts, or the fierce, protective devotion the Bible is willing to ascribe even to God guarding those he loves. Aimed instead at another person's advantage, the same heat curdles into envy, the grudging pain that someone else has what you want.
This is why one writer can both command it and condemn it. Paul tells the Corinthians to set their hearts eagerly on the best gifts, then a few lines later says that love does not envy, using the very same word. In one short stretch of Galatians he uses it three times, first of rivals courting his converts for selfish ends, then of the good kind of eager attention. The word holds both poles at once, and only the target tells you which one is in play.
Nuances
Whether the verb in 1 Corinthians 12:31 is imperative ("earnestly desire the greater gifts") or indicative ("you are striving after the greater gifts"), the indicative possibly a rhetorical question rebuking the Corinthians. The form is morphologically ambiguous.
- majorityImperative: Paul commands the church to earnestly desire the greater, more edifying gifts. The parallel command in 14:1, which follows "pursue love", is almost inescapably imperative and reads back onto 12:31.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (2014); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000); David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians, BECNT (2003)
- minorityIndicative or a rhetorical question: 12:31a describes or rebukes the Corinthians' actual striving after showier gifts, since Paul has just said the Spirit distributes gifts as he wills (12:11), which sits awkwardly with a command to seek the "greater" ones.; Gerhard Iber, "Zum Verstandnis von I Cor 12.31," ZNW 54 (1962): 43-52; Johannes P. Louw, "The Function of Discourse in a Sociosemiotic Theory of Translation," The Bible Translator 39 (1988): 329-335; Donghyun Jeong, "Translating 1 Corinthians 12.31a as a Rhetorical Question," The Bible Translator 75 (2024)