What Is Love According to the Bible? Its Definition and Meaning

In the Bible, love is patient, kind goodwill that seeks another person’s good rather than its own, and it starts with God. Paul describes it most fully in 1 Corinthians 13:4–7. John says it in three words, “God is love”, and shows it in God sending his Son for people who had not loved him first (1 John 4:8–10).

Everything else Scripture says about love grows from that order. God loves first, and we answer. The patience Paul praises, the love that “seeketh not her own”, is first the way God has dealt with us, and only then the way we are asked to deal with one another.

Jesus put the same love at the centre of God’s law: love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40). The Old Testament speaks of it in two Hebrew words, one for love and one for faithful kindness, above all God’s. The New Testament mostly uses one Greek word, agapē, which the King James Version translates “love” and, in some places, “charity”.

Paul describes love in the middle of his teaching on spiritual gifts, after telling the Corinthians, “yet shew I unto you a more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31):

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4–7, KJV)

In the modern English that the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes for the same verses, love “is patient and kind”, “does not insist on its own way” and is “not irritable or resentful” (paragraph 1825). Paul ends the chapter with what lasts: “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (13:13).

The King James Version says “charity” here for agapē, the same Greek word it translates “love” in 1 John 4. “Charity” comes from caritas, the word of the Latin Vulgate. According to the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, the King James translators used it “not with any regularity”, with one exception: for the love of God the word “is always translated by ‘love.’” Each phrase of the chapter is explained in what 1 Corinthians 13 says about love.

John’s first letter gives the Bible’s shortest definition of love, and grounds it in something God did:

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:8–10, KJV)

John’s order matters. Love begins with God, who moved first toward people who had not loved him, and everything John asks of his readers follows from that: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (4:11), and “We love him, because he first loved us” (4:19). He also sets a hard test for anyone who claims to love God: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar” (4:20).

Jesus spoke of the same love in his own words: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Paul adds that Christ died for people who were still sinners: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Pope Benedict XVI called his first encyclical (2005) Deus Caritas Est, which is Latin for “God is love”, the words of 1 John 4:8 in the Vulgate. He opened it with 1 John 4:16 and wrote that its words “express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith”.

Greek had several words for love, and four are often listed: agapē, philia, storgē and erōs. The New Testament uses the first two, uses storgē only inside other words, and never uses erōs.

Word	Meaning	In the New Testament
agapē (verb agapaō)	love, goodwill	About 260 times, noun and verb: 1 Corinthians 13, 1 John 4
philia (verb phileō)	friendship, fondness	The verb 25 times, 3 of them “kiss” (John 11:3); the noun once (James 4:4)
storgē	love of family	Only inside two compound words (Romans 1:31; 12:10)
erōs	desire, love between man and woman	Never

The counts are the Blue Letter Bible lexicon’s, for the Greek text behind the King James Version: agapē 117 times, agapaō 142 and phileō 25. Philia appears only in James’s warning that “the friendship of the world is enmity with God” (James 4:4). Storgē, the love of parents and children, is missing as a word of its own, but Paul uses two words built on it. Astorgos, “without natural affection”, is in his lists of sins (Romans 1:31; 2 Timothy 3:3), and philostorgos is his word for how Christians should treat each other: “Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love” (Romans 12:10).

Agapē is the love of 1 Corinthians 13 and of “God is love”. Pope Benedict noted that New Testament writers prefer it to the other words, though it “occurs rather infrequently in Greek usage” (Deus Caritas Est 3). Its meaning and its uses are the subject of what agape love is.

The words overlap more than popular lists suggest. Jesus says “the Father loveth the Son” (John 5:20), and the sisters of Lazarus send him word, “he whom thou lovest is sick” (John 11:3); both verses use phileō, the friendship word, for the Father’s love of the Son and for Jesus’ love of a friend.

Erōs is missing from the New Testament, yet the Bible has a whole book of love between a man and a woman. In the Song of Solomon the groom says, “How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse!” (4:10), and the poem says of love itself, “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” (8:7). The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, used agapē for that love in ten verses of the Song, 8:7 among them, as Thayer’s lexicon records.

Two Hebrew words carry most of it. The verb ahab and the noun ahabah are the ordinary words for love, and the King James Version translates the verb “love” 169 times. The second word, chesed, is harder to put into English. It can mean kindness between people, as when Jonathan asks David for it (1 Samuel 20:14–15), and it is also the word for God’s own faithful kindness. Lexicons give “lovingkindness, mercy, steadfast love, loyalty, faithfulness, goodness”, and the KJV spreads it across “mercy” (149 times), “kindness” (40) and “lovingkindness” (30), by the Blue Letter Bible’s count.

Chesed is in the words God proclaims about himself in Exodus: “The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands” (Exodus 34:6–7). It closes every one of the 26 verses of Psalm 136, beginning with “O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.” In Jeremiah both words stand together: “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31:3).

Deuteronomy says plainly that God’s love for Israel did not rest on Israel’s size or strength: “The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). The Law also commands love in return, toward God, toward a neighbour and toward a foreigner: “thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

When a lawyer asked Jesus which was the great commandment in the law, he answered with two, both from the Law of Moses:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37–40, KJV)

The first is Deuteronomy 6:5, which follows “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord”. Those verses open the Shema, which, as My Jewish Learning explains, “is the centerpiece of the daily morning and evening prayer services” in Judaism. The second is Leviticus 19:18, and Rabbi Akiva called it “an all-embracing principle in the Torah” (Sifra on Leviticus 19:18). In Luke’s Gospel a lawyer quotes the same two commandments and then asks, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29), and Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus extended the command to enemies: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). At supper with his disciples on the night Judas betrayed him (John 13:2), he gave it a new measure: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). Paul sums up the whole law the same way: “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10).

Christians of different traditions read the Ten Commandments through this answer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The Decalogue must be interpreted in light of this twofold yet single commandment of love, the fullness of the Law” (2055), and defines charity as “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God” (1822). The Westminster Larger Catechism, one of the standards of Presbyterian churches, sums up the first four commandments as “to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind” and the last six as “to love our neighbor as ourselves” (questions 102 and 122).

Scripture asks for both. Love can be commanded, so it reaches the will: the Bible tells people to love God, neighbours, foreigners and enemies, and John wants love shown in action: “let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). The list in 1 Corinthians 13 is a list of things a person can choose to do.

The Bible also tells of love that is felt. Of David and Jonathan, Scripture says that “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:1). The Song of Solomon calls love “strong as death” (8:6). And Paul, asking Christians to be “kindly affectioned one to another”, uses the family word, the warm affection of a household, for people who are not related at all (Romans 12:10).

For John, the feeling and the choice both come from the love God showed first. Benedict XVI said that because God has loved us first, “love is now no longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us” (Deus Caritas Est 1). John put it in a single line: “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

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• What is agape love?
• What 1 Corinthians 13 says about love
• Bible verses about love, and how Scripture defines it
• The parable of the Good Samaritan
• Bible verses about love and marriage
• Prayers about love, for love and to love better