malakos

This is the plain, physical meaning of the word: something that feels soft. In the New Testament it describes clothing, the fine and costly garments of people who live in comfort.

In the Gospels Jesus uses it to make a contrast. People who wear soft clothing live in the palaces of kings, not in the wilderness, so John the Baptist in his rough camel-hair was clearly not that kind of man. The word here is not an insult; it simply marks luxury and ease. A faint edge of social comment is present, since soft clothes belong to those who do not labor, but the sense is fundamentally literal.

The wider Greek world used the same word for soft beds, soft ground, soft skin, and gentle, mild things of every kind. The clothing sense in the Gospels sits squarely inside that ordinary range.

In one place, a list of people who will not inherit God's kingdom, the word is used not of cloth but of a kind of person. Standing on its own as a noun, in the plural and naming men, it carries a moral charge. It sits among sexual sins and immediately before a rare word for men who have sex with men, which pulls it toward a sexual meaning.

In its broader Greek use this same word named the man whose whole way of being was judged unmanly: self-indulgent, soft toward hardship and pleasure, given to luxury, lacking the steadiness and endurance the ancient world prized in men. That broad picture of softness often, though not always, included the willingness to be sexually used by another man. Ancient culture treated being penetrated as shameful for a man because it put him in what they regarded as a woman's position, so the same word could cover effeminacy in general and sexual passivity in particular.

Most careful interpreters today judge that here, beside the term for the active partner, the word most likely names the man who takes the passive, receiving role with another man, understood broadly rather than as one fixed practice. But scholars genuinely disagree over how narrowly to read it, and several read it more broadly. Because the ancient idea of softness was bound up with a low view of anything feminine, readers should be careful not to flatten it into any single modern label.