a fast: a stretch of time with no food taken, normally chosen as an act of devotion to God alongside prayer, sometimes simply food gone without
This is the noun for a fast, the thing itself, where the verb (νηστεύω) is the doing of it. Ordinary Greek used the noun for any empty stomach, including one a doctor prescribed, and the New Testament still uses it that way in a couple of places. But the Greek Old Testament had spent centuries using this word for Israel's practice of going without food before God, and that use settled into it. So in most New Testament verses it names a deliberate act of worship rather than a missed meal.
Where it means that, it stands next to prayer almost every time, and the pairing turns up in strikingly different settings:
- an elderly widow who kept it up at the temple for decades, night and day
- a married couple agreeing to a short stretch of it so they can pray
- a young church setting apart its first leaders and handing them over to God
That range is the point. There was no fixed form to keep and no season it belonged to. It was something people took up when they wanted their whole selves, bodies included, behind what they were asking God for.
Two uses sit outside that pattern. In Acts 27:9 Luke writes simply "the Fast" and expects his reader to know which one he means: the Day of Atonement, the single fast Israel's law required of everyone, kept in early autumn. He is not describing an act of devotion there at all; he is giving a date, the way we might say a voyage had run past the end of summer. And twice Paul drops the word into a list of what his work has cost him, beside beatings, sleepless nights, cold and no clothing, where many readers take it to mean nothing more religious than going hungry, close to the ordinary word for hunger (λιμός).
Nuances
Whether the plural νηστείαις in 2 Corinthians 6:5 and 11:27 denotes involuntary deprivation of food, one item in Paul's catalogue of endured hardships, or voluntary fasting undertaken as apostolic devotion.
- contestedThe plural denotes going without food involuntarily, listed among the afflictions Paul underwent; the standard lexicon cites both verses under abstinence from food with no religious reference.; BDAG, s.v. νηστεία
- contestedThe plural denotes fasts Paul chose, since λιμῷ καὶ δίψει in 11:27 already names involuntary want, and voluntary abstinence suits the self-discipline the neighboring items describe.; Philip E. Hughes, Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT; Eerdmans, 1962); Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 2005)