to owe: to be bound to give or do what is due, whether a real debt or a duty
This verb begins in the world of money and ledgers. It names the plain fact that one person owes another something measurable, a sum of coins or a quantity of goods, and the lender has a right to be paid back. That is its starting point, and the New Testament still uses it that way in the parables of debtors.
From there the word reaches naturally into the moral life. The same sense of being bound to settle an account becomes the sense of being bound to do what is right. To say a person owes something is to say that a relationship, a law, or simple fairness lays a real claim on them: they ought to act, and they would be in the wrong not to. So the word that measures a money debt also carries the weight of duty, and the two stay close. The New Testament loves this overlap, most famously in the charge to owe no one anything except to keep on loving one another, where the debt that is never paid off is love.
What unites every use is the idea of something owed and outstanding. Whether the thing owed is cash, an act of service, or a duty of love, the word says it is genuinely due and not yet discharged.