StrongerBible

koitē

κοίτη

GreekG2845“bed, marriage bed, ...”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Luk 11:7Rom 9:10Rom 13:13Heb 13:4
Root family
Names & words formed with this
Word studyResearch-gradeKOY-taynoun

What koitē means

1

a bed or sleeping place: the mat, platform, or piece of furniture a person lies down on.

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is the word's plain, everyday sense, and it comes straight from the verb "to lie." A bed is simply the place you lie down. In the one occurrence that keeps this literal sense in the New Testament, a father says his children are already with him in bed, the picture of a small peasant house where a whole family shared one raised sleeping mat.

Outside the Bible this concrete sense was the ordinary one: everyday documents use the word for lodging for the night, a pen for animals, even a plot of land. It is the same root that gives Greek its word for a bedchamber (κοιτών), the room where the bed stands.

Luk 11:7
2

sexual intercourse, named indirectly through the image of the bed: the marriage act, illicit sex, or the pregnancy it produces.

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled

From the plain sense of a bed the word moved, by a natural and very old figure of speech, to what happens in one. This indirect way of speaking about sex was not invented by the New Testament writers. It runs back through Greek poetry and was already at home in the Greek Old Testament, so by the first century it was ordinary, established language.

The same euphemism reaches in three directions:

  • the honored sexual union of husband and wife, which one writer calls the marriage bed kept undefiled;
  • illicit or excessive sexual acts, listed in the plural as a stock label for immorality;
  • and, stretched one step further, the conception that a sexual union produces.

Where English tends to name sex bluntly, this word points at it sideways. That is why the blunt Greek word for sexual immorality (πορνεία) and this word can describe the same behavior while sounding very different, and why the Hebrew word it usually translates (מִשְׁכָּב) carries the same reach from a literal bed to the marriage act.

Nuances

2athe sexual union of husband and wife, spoken of as the marriage bed.
TranslatabilityApproximate
Heb 13:4
2billicit or excessive sexual acts; sexual immorality.
Rom 13:13
2cconception, becoming pregnant, in the idiom of having conceived from a man.
TranslatabilityApproximate
Rom 9:10

What scholars say about koitē

κοίτη derives from κεῖμαι ("to lie") and its semantic center is a place for lying: a bed or bedstead (Homer Od. 19.341 onward), and by extension a lair, nest, lodging, animal pen, or plot of land in the documentary papyri, which never attest a sexual sense (Moulton-Milligan). The euphemistic use for sexual intercourse is a literary development, nascent in Euripides (Ion 892) but decisively established in Hellenistic Jewish Greek. In the Septuagint κοίτη occurs roughly 81 times, chiefly rendering Hebrew מִשְׁכָּב and secondarily שְׁכָבָה, and it carries the specialized cultic phrase κοίτη σπέρματος in the Levitical purity code (Lev 15:16-17; 18:20; 22:4). BDAG (3rd ed., 554) organizes the range under two macro-senses, a place for sleeping and the act of intercourse, the latter subdivided into the marriage bed (Heb 13:4), sexual excess in the plural (Rom 13:13), seminal emission, and conception (κοίτην ἔχειν, Rom 9:10); LSJ (9th ed.) lays out six divisions; TDNT 3 (Christian Maurer) treats the LXX cultic use as distinctive; Louw-Nida distribute it across furniture (6.106), sexual relations (23.62), and the idiom for conceiving. The word's wider significance is that it is the second element of ἀρσενοκοίτης (1 Cor 6:9; 1 Tim 1:10), a compound almost certainly compressed out of the adjacent ἄρσενος + κοίτην of LXX Lev 18:22 and 20:13. David F. Wright (VC 38 [1984]: 125-153; VC 41 [1987]: 396-398) established the majority derivation, in which the compound's -κοίτης element keeps its full sexual force; the reading is endorsed across the spectrum by Gagnon, Hays, Fee, Thiselton, Harper, Nissinen, and, though personally sympathetic to gay Christians, Loader and Brooten, against the revisionist proposals of Boswell and Dale Martin. That contested reception concerns the compound and its ethics, not the sense of κοίτη itself, which is lexically settled.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich), 3rd ed. (2000), 554, s.v. κοίτηlexicon
  • LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones), 9th ed. with revised supplement (1996), s.v. κοίτηlexicon
  • Christian Maurer, "κεῖμαι κτλ.," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 3:654-656dictionary
  • J.P. Louw and E.A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains (1989), 6.106; 23.62lexicon
  • J.H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (1930), s.v. κοίτηlexicon
  • Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (Anchor Bible 28A, 1985), 909-912commentary
  • Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia, 1989), 388-389commentary
  • James D.G. Dunn, Romans 9-16 (Word Biblical Commentary 38B, 1988), 542-543commentary
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Bible 3A, 2000), 1568-1569commentary
  • Saul M. Olyan, "'And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman'," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994): 179-206article
  • David F. Wright, "Homosexuals or Prostitutes? The Meaning of Ἀρσενοκοῖται," Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984): 125-153article
  • Robert A.J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice (2001), 312-336monograph
  • William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality (2012), 322-333monograph

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

All attested forms of κοίτη

accusative f s

κοίτην

Luk 11:7, Rom 9:10

dative f p

κοίταις

Rom 13:13

nominative f s

κοίτη

Heb 13:4