To sin sexually
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The Greek verb porneúō describes committing sexual immorality and, in Revelation’s symbolic visions, participating in the corrupt unfaithfulness associated with Babylon. Paul uses the verb when commanding believers to flee sexual immorality and when warning the church through Israel’s wilderness failure.
Reader summary
Full entry for πορνεύω (G4203) · Open the biblical lexicon
The Greek verb porneúō describes committing sexual immorality and, in Revelation’s symbolic visions, participating in the corrupt unfaithfulness associated with Babylon. Paul uses the verb when commanding believers to flee sexual immorality and when warning the church through Israel’s wilderness failure.
The BSB source-word alignment has 8 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include were immoral (2), [did] (1), commit sexual immorality (1), committed sexual immorality (1), sins sexually (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at 1 Corinthians 6:18. Its strongest book concentrations include Revelation (5), 1 Corinthians (3).
The Greek verb porneúō describes committing sexual immorality and, in Revelation’s symbolic visions, participating in the corrupt unfaithfulness associated with Babylon. Paul uses the verb when commanding believers to flee sexual immorality and when warning the church through Israel’s wilderness failure. Revelation uses it for teaching that draws Christ’s servants into sexual sin and idolatrous compromise, and later for kings entangled with Babylon’s seductive power and luxury.
The verb names culpable action and covenantal corruption; it should not be used to transfer guilt onto someone who has been assaulted, coerced, trafficked, groomed, or otherwise victimized by another person’s sin. Biblical clarity about sexual holiness must therefore remain joined to grace, repentance, embodied care, justice, and protection. The word neither licenses contemptuous labels nor allows symbolic uses to erase the concrete harm of sexual wrongdoing.
Paul uses porneúō for sexual conduct believers must flee, while Revelation applies it to both sexual compromise and a symbolic system of idolatrous, political, and economic unfaithfulness.
Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a man can commit is outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.
Paul commands flight from sexual immorality and speaks of the sexually sinning person’s action against the body within a larger argument about belonging to Christ.
We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died.
Israel’s wilderness failure becomes a warning to the church not to repeat sexual immorality alongside idolatry, testing, and grumbling.
But I have a few things against you, because some of you hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to place a stumbling block before the Israelites so they would eat food sacrificed to idols and commit sexual immorality.
Christ rebukes teaching that places a stumbling block before his servants by joining idolatrous food with the commission of sexual immorality.
But I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads My servants to be sexually immoral and to eat food sacrificed to idols.
The church is held accountable for tolerating influential teaching that misleads Christ’s servants into sexual immorality and idolatrous eating.
All the nations have drunk the wine of the passion of her immorality. The kings of the earth were immoral with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown wealthy from the extravagance of her luxury.”
Babylon’s immorality is portrayed as a corrupting system entangling nations, rulers, merchants, passion, and luxury before divine judgment.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Greek word. Sexual immorality or idolatry; literal fornication or metaphorical unfaithfulness to God in worship.
Sexual immorality or idolatry; literal fornication or metaphorical unfaithfulness to God in worship.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpusGreek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
8 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
I fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseI fornicate, practice idolatry
Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How mood, tense, and voice shift the force of this verb in context.
This verb appears through different tense, voice, mood, or stem patterns. Those forms help readers see how the action is presented in context.
Verse guides are not available for this word yet, so verse references remain plain evidence markers.
How this verb appears across 7 occurrences in the NT discourse index (MACULA Greek SBLGNT).
Aspect reflects grammatical form — not authorial emphasis. Participles and infinitives are verbal adjectives and nouns respectively.
Clause data: MACULA Greek (Clear Bible, CC BY 4.0) · SBLGNT (Logos/SBL, CC BY 4.0)
πορνεύω is built from this root:
Porneúō requires moral clarity without pastoral carelessness. In 1 Corinthians, believers who belong to Christ are commanded to flee sexual immorality because their bodies matter to the Lord and are not disposable instruments. The wilderness warning shows that covenant privilege does not make disobedience safe. Revelation then exposes teaching and power structures that normalize sexual sin, idolatrous compromise, and participation in Babylon’s corrupt allure.
These passages confront actors, teachers, communities, and rulers; they do not assign an offender’s guilt to a person who was coerced or harmed. The church should therefore speak plainly about sexual sin, call for repentance, and refuse enabling systems, while also protecting victims and resisting shame that obscures the gospel. Forgiveness does not erase consequences, repentance does not instantly restore trust, and a lexical study cannot replace careful pastoral, safeguarding, or civil response in a specific case.
1Cor.6.18
Porneúō is an action verb. Its forms in 1 Corinthians and Revelation describe committing sexual immorality, while Revelation’s Babylon imagery extends the verb figuratively to unfaithful participation in a corrupt system; grammar and context identify the acting subject.
The Old Testament frequently joins sexual immorality and covenant-unfaithfulness imagery, especially when idolatry is portrayed as betrayal of the Lord. The New Testament preserves that prophetic seriousness while grounding believers’ embodied holiness in union with Christ, the Spirit’s presence, and the church’s accountable life under Jesus’ lordship.