StrongerBible

timē

τιμή

GreekG5092“honor, price, ...”

Appears 43 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 27:6Mat 27:9Jhn 4:44Act 4:34Act 5:2Act 5:3Act 7:16Act 19:19Act 28:10Rom 2:7Rom 2:10Rom 9:21Rom 12:10Rom 13:7 (2×)1Co 6:201Co 7:231Co 12:231Co 12:24Col 2:231Th 4:41Ti 1:171Ti 5:171Ti 6:11Ti 6:162Ti 2:202Ti 2:21Heb 2:7Heb 2:9Heb 3:3Heb 5:41Pe 1:71Pe 2:71Pe 3:7Rev 5:13Rev 7:12Rev 19:1
Names & words formed with this
Word studyResearch-gradetee-MAYnoun

What timē means

1

honor: the public recognition of someone's worth, and the respect or esteem that worth is owed.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is the side of the word readers expect. To honor a person is to acknowledge their worth out loud and to treat them accordingly, and in the ancient Mediterranean that acknowledgment was the very currency of social life. People honored those above them, those above honored those below, and a person's standing rose or fell on whether the community granted them this recognition.

The New Testament keeps that whole world in place but quietly turns it on its head. It still tells believers to honor parents, rulers, masters, and one another. Yet it insists that the greater honor be given to the members who seem to count for least, that the deepest honor be redirected from the emperor to God, and that the cross, the most shameful death Rome could inflict, is in fact the place where the highest honor is won.

The senses below are not different words but different settings for one act of recognition: honor passed between people, honor offered to God and to Christ in worship, honor promised as a reward to the faithful, and honor that comes attached to an office.

Nuances

1arespect or esteem shown from one person to another.
Jhn 4:44Rom 9:21Rom 12:10Rom 13:7 (2×)1Co 12:231Co 12:241Th 4:41Ti 5:171Ti 6:12Ti 2:202Ti 2:211Pe 3:7
1Ti 5:17

Whether the honor due to elders here includes material payment or means respect alone.

  • majorityIt includes material support: honor and remuneration together, clinched by the following verse's pairing of a quotation about not muzzling the working ox with the saying that the worker deserves his wage.; I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles, ICC (1999); William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, WBC (2000); Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, NICNT (2006)
  • minorityIt means honor in the sense of respect and recognition; material provision was a cultural consequence of honoring a benefactor but is not the primary meaning of the word here.; Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, Anchor Bible (2001)
1bhonor offered up to God or to Christ in worship.
1Ti 1:171Ti 6:16Heb 2:7Heb 2:9Heb 3:32Pe 1:17Rev 4:9Rev 4:11Rev 5:12Rev 5:13Rev 7:12Rev 19:1
1chonor promised as a reward to the faithful, especially at the end.
Rom 2:7Rom 2:101Pe 1:7
1dthe dignity that belongs to a position or office.
Heb 5:4
2

price: the amount at which something is valued, or the money it fetches.

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is the side of the word most readers miss, yet to a first-century ear it was the most ordinary meaning of all. In everyday receipts and sale contracts the word simply meant the price of a thing: the wheat-price, the cost named in a contract, the sum a sale brought in. The New Testament uses it that way without any fuss in Acts and in Matthew.

It does not stay neutral for long. Matthew uses it to chilling effect when Jesus is appraised at thirty pieces of silver, the going rate for an injured slave. And Paul turns it into a statement of the gospel: you were bought with a price, he tells believers, meaning they now belong to a new master. He never names the sum, but the rest of the New Testament makes plain that the price was the death of Christ.

It is worth saying clearly that this price meaning and the honor meaning above are not two unrelated words that happen to be spelled alike. In the ancient world the worth of a person and the worth of a thing were measured by the same yardstick of public value, so the one word held both. The senses below are the strictly commercial uses, where money is actually changing hands.

Nuances

2athe price of something, or the money a sale brings in.
Mat 27:6Mat 27:9Act 4:34Act 5:2Act 5:3Act 7:16Act 19:19
2bthe price by which someone is bought, used of believers purchased by Christ.
1Co 6:201Co 7:23
2cthe value or worth attributed to something, without a literal sale.
Col 2:23Rev 21:24Rev 21:26

What scholars say about timē

The standard references (BDAG, Louw-Nida, LSJ, Moulton-Milligan, and Schneider in TDNT VIII) treat timē as one word spanning a single field of social and economic valuation, with two poles that koine Greek never separated: public honor and monetary price. BDAG organizes it under price/value, compensation, and esteem/reverence; Louw-Nida is forced to split it across three semantic domains, and the instability of that split is itself the evidence that the price/honor distinction is not native to the word. Schneider traces the term from Homer (where a warrior's honor is materially embodied in his share of spoil) through Aristotle (for whom civic offices are themselves timai) to Hellenistic civic life, the Septuagint, and the New Testament. Documentary papyri (Moulton-Milligan) show the commercial sense was the ordinary everyday register. The Septuagint cemented the polysemy by using the one word both for the Hebrew honor-and-glory vocabulary and for pricing and valuation terms, including the valuation laws of Leviticus 27. The contested New Testament texts (double honor for elders at 1 Timothy 5:17; the honor of 1 Peter 2:7; the value language of Colossians 2:23; the bought-with-a-price formula of 1 Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23) are read by the dominant scholarship not as lexical puzzles but as questions of how honor and price interacted in first-century culture. A large body of social-scientific work (Malina, Neyrey, deSilva, Elliott on 1 Peter) reads the term through Mediterranean honor-and-shame anthropology; that paradigm has been refined and partly criticized (Downing, Crook), yielding a more text-disciplined version in which honor remains a major category but is tested rather than assumed.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG (Bauer-Danker), s.v. τιμήlexicon
  • Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, s.v. τιμήlexicon
  • LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones), s.v. τιμήlexicon
  • Moulton-Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. τιμήlexicon
  • Johannes Schneider, "τιμή," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 8:169-180dictionary
  • Moisés Silva, ed., New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDNTTE), s.v. τιμήdictionary
  • J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (1997)monograph
  • Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (1990)monograph
  • Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, 3rd ed. (2001)monograph
  • David A. deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, 2nd ed. (2022)monograph
  • John H. Elliott, 1 Peter, Anchor Bible 37B (2000)commentary
  • I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles, ICC (1999)commentary
  • Zeba A. Crook, "Honor, Shame, and Social Status Revisited," Journal of Biblical Literature 128 (2009)article
  • F. Gerald Downing, "'Honor' Among Exegetes," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999)article

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of τιμή

accusative f s

τιμὴν, τιμήν

Mat 27:9, Jhn 4:44, Rom 2:7, Rom 9:21, Rom 13:7, 1Co 12:23, 2Ti 2:20, 2Ti 2:21

nominative f s

τιμὴ

Mat 27:6, Rom 2:10, 1Ti 1:17, 1Ti 6:16, 1Pe 2:7, Rev 5:13, Rev 7:12, Rev 19:1

genitive f s

τιμῆς

Act 5:2, Act 5:3, Act 7:16, 1Co 6:20, 1Co 7:23, 1Ti 5:17, 1Ti 6:1

dative f s

τιμῇ

Rom 12:10, Col 2:23, 1Th 4:4, Heb 2:7, Heb 2:9

accusative f p

τιμὰς

Act 4:34, Act 19:19

dative f p

τιμαῖς

Act 28:10