Company

Company, in the Bible’s usage, is the association a person keeps — the companions, circle, or assembly one chooses to walk with, stand among, or be joined to — and Scripture treats it as a moral matter rather than neutral social contact.

The text says that company shapes a person. Psalm 1:1 describes a progression of increasing attachment: walking in the counsel of the wicked, standing in the path of sinners, sitting in the seat of scoffers. Psalm 26:4–5 places the same idea on the lips of the speaker as a claim of innocence — “I have not sat with deceitful men… I hate the assembly of evildoers” — and the Hebrew noun behind “assembly” there is qahal, the ordinary word for a gathered congregation, so the line sets one assembly against another rather than rejecting gathering as such. Proverbs 13:20 states the consequence proverbs-style: “One who walks with wise men grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm,” where the verb rendered “walks with” (Hebrew ra‘ah) means to associate with or keep company.

In the New Testament the warnings concentrate on persuasion. Romans 16:18, Ephesians 5:6, and 2 Peter 2:18 all locate the danger in speech — smooth and flattering words, empty words, “great swelling words of emptiness” — so that harmful company works by drawing people in, not merely by proximity. First Corinthians 15:33 quotes “Evil companionships corrupt good morals,” a line scholars generally recognize as coming from the Greek comic poet Menander; the noun translated “companionships” (homiliai) means associations or company. Second Corinthians 6:14 uses an agricultural image, “unequally yoked” (Greek heterozygeo, a mismatched pair under one yoke), and 2 Corinthians 6:17 gives the counter-command, “Come out from among them, and be separate.” Exodus 23:33 supplies the rationale that recurs throughout: close association with other worship “will surely be a snare to you,” because it leads into sin against God. Second Timothy 3:5 applies the principle to religious company — people “holding a form of godliness but having denied its power” — with the instruction, “Turn away from these.”

Christian traditions differ on how far these commands reach. Historically, separatist, Anabaptist, holiness, and monastic traditions have read 2 Corinthians 6:14–17 as requiring visible withdrawal from unbelieving institutions and from compromised religious bodies, including in matters of worship and church membership. Reformed, Catholic, Anglican, and much evangelical teaching has generally read the same passage as governing binding spiritual partnerships — most concretely marriage and shared worship — while treating ordinary civic and social contact as legitimate. A third emphasis, common in pastoral writing across traditions, treats Proverbs 13:20 and 1 Corinthians 15:33 as wisdom about formative friendships rather than as a boundary of community. The disagreement is real and turns on how narrowly the “yoke” and the “coming out” are defined.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.