The New Testament never uses the Greek word for romantic desire. The Old Testament gives it a whole book. Both of those facts matter, and most sermons on the four loves get at least one of them wrong.
Eros is the ancient Greek word for romantic and sexual desire, the longing to have and be joined to the one you love. It never appears in the Greek New Testament, and it shows up only rarely in the Greek Old Testament.
But the thing the word describes is all over Scripture. The Song of Solomon celebrates it, Proverbs warns about it, and the Bible treats it as a good gift that belongs inside the covenant of marriage.
So when somebody tells you eros is the worldly love and agape is the godly one, they have turned a vocabulary list into a theology. The Bible does not do that.
To a Greek, eros was two things at once. It was a god, the figure of desire in Greek myth, later painted as the winged boy with the bow. And it was an ordinary word for the pull one person feels toward another, the kind that keeps you up at night.
The philosophers took it further. In Plato's Symposium, a dinner party of speeches in praise of Eros, Socrates repeats what he says a wise woman named Diotima taught him: desire starts with one beautiful person and, if it is trained well, climbs toward beauty itself. Philosopher C. D. C. Reeve sums up her point in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: what we all love is the good, and “we want good things to be ours forever.”
Eros is feared as a power that overrides reason. You do not choose it; you are struck.
The Symposium turns desire into a ladder toward the beautiful and the good.
When the Hebrew Scriptures are put into Greek in the centuries before Jesus, the noun eros appears only rarely, and mostly in warnings.
Twenty-seven books, written in Greek, and not one of them uses the word.
The Four Loves makes eros a household word for Christians again, as the love of “being in love.”
Notice the difference. Plato's ladder climbs away from the particular person toward an idea. The Bible keeps its lovers embodied and named, inside a covenant.
This is the part most articles on eros skip. Here is what the Greek Bible actually does with the word and its family.
In the Septuagint, the seductress invites the young man to wrap themselves in eros till morning. The first use most readers meet is an invitation to adultery.
A list of things never satisfied. Where the Hebrew has the barren womb, the Greek translators wrote the eros of a woman, alongside Hades and Tartarus.
The related verb shows up in a surprising place. Of wisdom the Greek says erasthēti, love her with the eros verb, and she will keep you.
The greatest love poem in the Bible reaches for a different word. Love is strong as death is rendered with agape, not eros.
That last line is worth sitting with. The Greek translators of the Song of Solomon used agape for a bride and groom who cannot wait to be alone together. The same verb, agapao, is used in 2 Samuel 13 for Amnon's obsession with his half sister Tamar, an obsession that ended in violence against her.
So the popular idea that agape is a special, pure, heavenly word and eros is the dirty one does not survive a look at the Greek Old Testament. Agape was the everyday word. Jesus is the one who filled it with the meaning we now attach to it, by laying down His life. The word got its weight from Him, not the other way around.
In the Greek Septuagint, which word says “love is strong as death” in Song of Solomon 8:6?
It is agape. The translators used it for passionate love between a man and a woman, which is a good reminder that the Bible does not sort love into holy and unholy words. It sorts love by what it serves.
Why is eros absent from the New Testament? Nobody knows for sure. A common explanation is that the word carried too much pagan baggage. That is plausible, but it is an argument from silence. The simpler observation is that the apostles mostly write about love in the church and the love of God, and agape was already doing that work in their Greek Bible.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
If you want to know what the Bible thinks about romantic desire, do not start with a Greek word list. Start with the book that is entirely about it. We walk through it fully in our study of the Song of Solomon; here is the short version.
“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”
Song of Solomon 8:6 to 7That is not a grudging permission slip. It calls married desire a fire God lit, and the Song is not alone.
The first couple are naked and not ashamed. Before anything goes wrong, bodies and desire are simply good.
Rejoice in the wife of your youth and be intoxicated always in her love. The answer to adultery is delight at home.
Paul says husband and wife owe each other their bodies, and neither should withhold from the other except briefly and by agreement. Mutual, not one sided.
Marriage is to be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled. Honor and protection, both at once.
The Song also carries a refrain that keeps the fire from becoming a wildfire: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.” Desire is real and strong, which is exactly why it needs a right time and a right home.
Here is something you cannot see in English. The Hebrew word dodim, a plural that means love in the passionate sense, is used for the bride in Song of Solomon 1:2, “your love is better than wine.” It is also used by the seductress in Proverbs 7:18, “Come, let us take our fill of love till morning.”
Same word. The Bible does not pretend the adulteress is offering something fake. She offers the real thing in the wrong place, which is what makes it dangerous.
Desire spoken openly between two people who belong to each other. It builds a home, it is celebrated by friends, and it grows into the seal of chapter 8.
The same desire whispered in secret, with a husband away on a journey. It promises one night and, in the proverb's own picture, it leads down to death.
That is the biblical ethic of eros in one comparison. Desire is not the problem. Direction is. The Bible never asks you to kill the fire. It asks you to build a hearth for it, called covenant. That is why we believe, as we explained in our answer on sex before marriage, that sex belongs inside marriage.
Some people reading this were taught that their desires made them dirty. Some were hurt by someone else's desire. Some are married and the fire went out years ago, and some are single and tired of being told to wait. None of that makes you less loved by God or less welcome in His church.
Desire is part of how God made you, and your story is not over. If you want someone to pray with you, send us a prayer request and a real person at Sound of Heaven will pray for you by name.
The Bible uses the same word for the bride's love and the adulteress's offer. It does not treat desire as the enemy. It treats misdirected desire as the danger.
Churches and culture have each picked a way to get eros wrong.
This view says real Christian love is agape, and desire is something to be tolerated in marriage, never enjoyed. It is often preached with good intentions, and it leaves married couples, especially wives taught that intimacy is a duty, feeling guilty about the very thing the Song celebrates.
This is the culture's view. If you feel it, follow it. If you stop feeling it, leave. Every promise lasts exactly as long as the feeling does.
C. S. Lewis saw the second mistake clearly. In The Four Loves he wrote that “Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.” Being in love says forever. Being in love, by itself, cannot deliver forever. Something else has to keep the promise the feeling made.
Lewis also drew a helpful line between raw sexual desire and eros proper: “Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.” That is exactly the difference between Proverbs 7 and the Song. One wants an experience. The other wants a person.
At Sound of Heaven we believe eros is a good gift from a good God. Romantic and sexual desire is part of being made in His image, and the Song of Solomon is in the Bible because God wants His people to see married love as holy, joyful and worth celebrating. Treating desire as shameful is wrong, and it has done real damage in the church.
We also believe eros belongs inside the covenant of marriage, and that it cannot carry a marriage on its own. Feelings rise and fall. Covenant, friendship and self-giving love are what hold two people together through the seasons when desire is quiet.
And we will be honest about the limits of the evidence. The New Testament's silence about the word eros tells us about vocabulary, not about God's opinion of desire. Anyone who builds a doctrine on that silence, in either direction, is claiming more than the text gives.
Lewis was right that eros promises more than it can perform. That is not a reason to distrust it. It is a clue to where it points.
Every lover in the Song longs for a love that is stronger than death. The Bible's answer is not a better feeling. It is a Person. In Jesus, God keeps the promise that every human love makes and cannot keep alone. He loved to the end, gave Himself completely, and rose. That is why Paul can tell husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the church” in Ephesians 5. Desire is not replaced. It is given a pattern.
So a Christian marriage does not have less eros than the world. It has eros with a spine. The Kingdom of God is here now, and a marriage is one of the places His love shows up in ordinary, embodied, delighted ways.
If you want to see how eros fits beside the other loves, read the types of love in the Bible, then what agape love really is and what John meant by God is love. For the harder side of desire, see what the Bible calls lust, and for the bigger picture, the purpose of marriage and being made in the image of God.
Eros is the Greek word for romantic desire, the New Testament never uses it and the Septuagint mostly uses it in warnings, but the Song of Solomon celebrates the love it names as a flame from God, and Jesus is the love that keeps the promise eros makes.
Whether it is shame from the past or a marriage that feels cold, you do not have to sort it out alone. Tell us what is on your heart and we will pray with you.
Eros is the ancient Greek word for romantic and sexual desire, the longing to be joined to the person you love. The word itself never appears in the Greek New Testament and shows up only rarely in the Septuagint, mostly in warnings like Proverbs 7:18. But the love it describes is everywhere in Scripture. The Song of Solomon celebrates it, Proverbs 5 tells a husband to delight in his wife, and Paul treats married intimacy as something spouses owe each other. The Bible treats eros as a good gift that belongs inside the covenant of marriage.
No. The New Testament was written in Greek, yet none of its twenty-seven books uses the word eros. Why is an open question. Some say the apostles avoided it because of its ties to pagan worship and Greek philosophy, which is plausible but an argument from silence. The simpler explanation is that the New Testament mostly talks about love within the church and the love of God, and agape was already the word doing that work in the Greek Old Testament they read.
No. Eros is desire, and desire is part of how God made people. The Song of Solomon calls married love a flame of the LORD, and Genesis 2 says the first couple were naked and not ashamed. What Scripture warns against is desire aimed in the wrong direction. Proverbs 7 and Song of Solomon 1 even use the same Hebrew word for love, one in an invitation to adultery and one in a marriage song. The fire is the same. The difference is the covenant around it.
In ordinary Greek, eros meant romantic desire and agape was a common word for love and affection. The Septuagint used agape for the passionate love in Song of Solomon 8:6 and the related verb for Amnon's obsession in 2 Samuel 13, so agape was not a special holy word on its own. Jesus gave it the meaning Christians attach to it now by laying down His life. In marriage the two belong together: desire draws two people close, and self-giving love keeps the promise desire makes.
In The Four Loves, published in 1960, Lewis used eros for the state of being in love and called its sexual element Venus. He wrote that “Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.” He also warned that “Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.” Being in love says forever, but feelings alone cannot deliver forever. Lewis believed eros needs the help of God's love to keep its own promises, which fits the Bible's picture of desire within covenant.