Status: Conjecture
There is a general tendency among commentators and even translation committees to use lexicons in a very disturbing way: read all the glosses until you find one that seems to fit your preconceived ideas about the text, and then drop that gloss into your translation. This is intuitive judgment (Haidt), or System 1 thinking (Kahneman): fast, unconscious, stereotypic. This has been going on for a thousand years and will continue to despite my attempt here at reasoned judgment and persuasion.
To an extent, this is merely hypocognition: it’s hard to bring, say, an anthropological or sociological argument to bear when you’ve never been exposed to either subject. But in hermeneutics, especially at the lay level of pastors, there is a clear pattern of social intuition: glosses are chosen to make the point of the sermon of the week, which you probably picked up from someone else’s sermon or self-help book, in order to persuade other people about that point. When pressed on these intuitive judgments, most people rationalize the chosen gloss post hoc based on authority. The word “ζηλόω” means “to desire” because that’s what Louw and Nida says, or “be jealous” because that’s what LSJ says, or “strive for” because that’s what BDAG says, without any attempt to reconcile these varying semantics.
When glosses are taken at face value as “the meaning” of a word, then intuitive judgment forces multiple glosses to become “multiple meanings”. If one word in Greek has six glosses in English, it must have six “meanings”. This is horribly ethnocentric: ask the Greek speaker how many meanings it has and they would say “one”. Our job as faithful translators is to approach that native understanding, and only then to select an appropriate rendering for each context in the target language.
This does not mean that, when we translate the Greek word to English, we must use the same single English word in every context. It is absolutely true that the meaning of the text may take several forms in the target language. But the idea that those meanings can be unrelated is almost always wrong. In many cases, those relations do not make intuitive sense to us, because our presuppositions about how the world works are radically different from those of the author. But especially in these cases, the words and their meanings and indeed the texts in which they occur are properly understood only by exploring those relations in all the contexts we can find, until they do make sense and we agree with the Greek speaker that there is “one meaning”, even if that takes a paragraph or two of English to convey. Your mind is as perfectly capable of this with any Greek word as it is with the German word “gestalt”–there is a single “meaning” in your mind, and you can probably describe it with an English sentence or two, but there is no single-word English equivalent.
With that in mind, let’s try to find the meaning of ζηλ-
1 Corinthians 10:21b-22 SBLGNT: οὐ δύνασθε τραπέζης κυρίου μετέχειν καὶ τραπέζης δαιμονίων. ἢ παραζηλοῦμεν τὸν κύριον; μὴ ἰσχυρότεροι αὐτοῦ ἐσμεν; ESV: You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? NIV: you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. 22 Are we trying to arouse the Lord’s jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
This is as good a place as any to start. Skipping over the Greek examples and any non-NT references from the corpus (as one does), LSJ says:
παραζηλόω: provoke to jealousy (Ep.Rom.10.19), fret, be vexed, emulate, imitate
…which isn’t much to go on. Apparently fewer glosses made the job easier for the ESV (read Lee for a complete study of this phenomenon). At least the NIV wondered whether there was a more modern turn of phrase. But suppose we even think to explore the meaning a bit more by examining one of its roots (this is OK because, as we all know, prepositional prefixes merely “intensify” the root word, wink):
ζηλόω: I 1. vie with, emulate, to be jealous of, envy, to be jealous (1 Ep.Cor.13.4), through jealousy, to be jealous for
Clearly, “jealousy” is mentioned a lot, and it seems to fit the central idea least worst in this text; we’re certainly not trying to “admire” or “pay zealous court to” the lord here. It’s a bit dodgy because, in our text, the verb is active indicative, and although it includes the -όω ending which often indicates “to cause”, there are no other examples of its usage which fit that pattern. We are the ones who “παραζηλόω”, whatever that means; LSJ and its copyists resolve the paradox by keeping us as the actors, but switching the verb to “provoke”.
But on to the more important dilemma. Later in the same letter, we stumble across this:
1 Corinthians 14:1 SBLGNT: Διώκετε τὴν ἀγάπην, ζηλοῦτε δὲ τὰ πνευματικά, μᾶλλον δὲ ἵνα προφητεύητε ESV: Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. NIV: Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy.
Hrm. I thought ζηλόω meant “be jealous of”. Jealousy is a bad thing, isn’t it? It was in chapter 10. Why did the ESV choose “earnestly desire” here as if it’s a good thing? I guess since LSJ says “desire” that must just be another meaning of the word. Cue the forum thread about which gloss is most accurate, including the conspiracy theories about whether this should actually be translated as “be jealous of them”.
Cultural anthropology can resolve these paradoxes in a more satisfying way. In short, ζηλόω doesn’t mean “be jealous” or “desire”; it means “to compete as a rival”. Today, we hardly know what this means. We have mostly relegated it to sports teams, and the participation even there is dwindling. On the whole, we do not like the idea of people or groups competing over resources, because we believe almost nothing is in short supply–it only takes ingenuity to create more. But in the first century’s agonistic society, everything was a “limited good”, and it was honorable to compete over them for the sake of your family, tribe, or patron in order to maintain your existing social status. Indeed, Pollux (5.158) listed “ζῆλος” as a synonym of “δόξα” (reputation).
When exercised properly, ζῆλος was not just “a good thing” but the foundation of interaction between groups of similar status. When exercised within a group, however, ζῆλος was self-destructive. When exercised toward a group with much higher status, it was downright antisocial. It was honorable to maintain the status of one’s own group but dishonorable to attempt to radically increase it since your gain must be another’s loss. This is why in chapter 10, it is ridiculous:
21b You all are not able to participate in the lord’s table and a table of demons. 22 or are we rivalling beside the lord? we are not stronger than him, are we?
And indeed, the prepositional prefix doesn’t merely “intensify” the root, it clarifies that rivalry is only appropriate with those “beside” oneself: one’s peers.