opheilē

LSJ gives ὀφειλή two senses, "a debt" (Matt 18:32) and "one's due" (Rom 13:7; 1 Cor 7:3); BDAG distinguishes "debt," "obligation," and specifically the marital duty of 1 Cor 7:3. Hauck's TDNT treatment of the ὀφείλω group situates the noun in the ordinary commercial and legal world of obligation. A standing correction is needed to the older handbooks: Thayer states that the noun is "found neither in the Greek O.T. nor in secular authors," and Meyer likewise denied it to Greek writers, but LSJ adduces the Bodleian ostracon (Ostr.Bodl. i 311, 3rd cent. BC) and the Berlin papyri BGU 1158.18 and BGU 112.11, and Deissmann (Bible Studies, 221) with Moulton and Milligan, followed by Abbott-Smith, corrected the entry from the documentary evidence. A related precision matters: the celebrated classical loci (Thucydides 2.40; Plato, Laws 717b; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1165a3) belong under the neuter cognate ὀφείλημα, not under ὀφειλή, and the exact noun ὀφειλή appears to be essentially absent from the Septuagint, whose debt-remission vocabulary uses ὀφείλημα (1 Macc 15:8; Deut 24:10, rendering מַשָּׁאָה). For the same reason the influential "sin as debt" scholarship of Anderson (Sin: A History) and Eubank (Wages of Cross-Bearing and Debt of Sin), which traces the Second Temple shift from sin as a burden borne to sin as a debt owed by way of the Aramaic root meaning both "debt" and "sin," attaches to ὀφείλημα and to Matthew's wider commercial idiom rather than to this noun, even though Matt 18:32 stands inside precisely that Matthean economy. On Rom 13:7, Jewett (Hermeneia), Cranfield (ICC) and Fitzmyer (Anchor Bible) read the plural ὀφειλαί as broad social obligation grounded in office rather than merit, the internal warrant being that φόβος and τιμή are not monetary; Cranfield ties v. 7 to the never-discharged debt of love in v. 8. On 1 Cor 7:3 the critical text (א A B C D F G, Old Latin, Vulgate debitum, Tertullian) reads τὴν ὀφειλήν against the Byzantine and Textus Receptus τὴν ὀφειλομένην εὔνοιαν behind the KJV's "due benevolence," with Chrysostom preserving ὀφειλομένην τιμήν; Metzger's Textual Commentary, Fee (NICNT) and Thiselton (NIGTC) judge ὀφειλήν original and the longer reading a scribal softening, as Godet had already argued, and the older exegetes (Alford) labelled the referent debitum tori, "the debt of the marriage bed." Deming reads the chapter against the Stoic and Cynic debate on whether the wise man should marry and locates ὀφειλή within standard Hellenistic language of marital duties, with van der Horst cautioning in Bryn Mawr Classical Review that this can eclipse the passage's Jewish elements. Garland, Ciampa and Rosner, and Thiselton stress the mutuality of vv. 3 to 4; Wire, Martin, Harper, Gundry-Volf, MacDonald, Vander Stichele and Hays debate whether that mutuality subverts or reinscribes gender hierarchy. Brundage and Makowski trace how Gratian's Decretum and Aquinas turned the phrase into the canon-law debitum coniugale, a debt payable on demand, which is reception history rather than Paul's own frame (cf. 1 Cor 7:5 to 6, consent and concession).