to become angry: to be roused to anger against a person or against what they have done
This was ordinary Greek for getting angry, the same word a playwright would use of a man losing his temper in the street. In the New Testament it always describes anger rising in the person themselves, never one person stirring up anger in someone else, which is the work of a companion verb (παροργίζω). The noun beside it, ὀργή, names anger as a settled disposition and the punishment it finally brings; this verb names the moment anger takes hold of someone.
The word passes no verdict of its own, so everything depends on who is angry and why. That is how the New Testament can set it on both sides of the same question. Jesus puts being angry with a fellow believer on the same footing as murder, while Paul can write "be angry and do not sin" and then give the anger a deadline: it must not outlast the sunset. The heat itself is not named as the sin. What a person nurses it into is.
Its widest use is in Jesus' parables, where a king or a master or a host becomes angry and acts, and the listener is meant to hear God's own judgment behind the story. Revelation turns the picture around. There it is the nations, and then the dragon, who rage, and their fury is answered by a wrath far larger than their own.
Nuances
Whether the words "without cause" belong in the text of Matthew 5:22, and so whether Jesus condemns anger at a fellow believer as such or only anger that is unjustified.
- majorityThe shorter text is original, so Jesus condemns anger against a brother itself. The extra words are much more likely a copyist's softening of a hard saying than an accidental omission, and the earliest Greek witnesses lack them.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, at Matthew 5:22 (rated B); Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed., apparatus at Matthew 5:22
- minorityThe longer text is original, given its very wide attestation from the second century onward across Greek, Old Latin, Syriac and Coptic witnesses, so the saying targets anger without just cause rather than anger as such.; Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte 1.9
Whether Ephesians 4:26 commands anger outright or merely concedes it, that is, whether it means "be angry, and do not sin" or "if you are angry, do not sin".
- contestedA genuine command. Paul reproduces the Greek of Psalm 4:5 in the Septuagint word for word, where the form is plainly an imperative, and a command joined to a command by "and" does not naturally yield a conditional clause in Greek. Bitencourt extends this by way of the appeal to Psalm 4 to a positive, active anger aimed at whatever threatens the unity of the Spirit in Ephesians 4:3.; Daniel B. Wallace, Ὀργίζεσθε in Ephesians 4:26: Command or Condition?, Criswell Theological Review 3.2 (1989): 353-72; Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (2002); Thiago Bitencourt, Righteous or Dangerous? An Investigation of Ὀργίζεσθε in Ephesians 4:26, Southeastern Theological Review 13.1 (2022)
- contestedA conditional or concessive use: "if you are angry" or "though you may be angry, do not sin". The surrounding letter soon tells readers to put anger away altogether, which makes a positive command to be angry hard to sustain.; C. L. Mitton, Ephesians, New Century Bible; Joachim Gnilka, Der Epheserbrief, HThKNT