Gluttony

Gluttony is the inordinate pursuit of food and drink — eating or drinking to excess, or letting appetite rather than judgment set the terms of a life — which Scripture treats less as a single act than as a settled disposition of desire. The vocabulary is limited but pointed: the Hebrew word behind “glutton” in the law (Deuteronomy 21:21, closing the case of the stubborn and rebellious son) is consistently paired with “drunkard,” and the Greek of Philippians 3:19 names the stomach itself, koilia, as a would-be god. Established linguistic fact: the Bible’s indictments almost never isolate eating from drinking, and almost never isolate either from a whole pattern of life.

What the text says is that appetite becomes sin when it demands on its own authority. In Psalm 78:18 the wilderness generation “tempted God in their heart by asking food according to their desire” — the fault named is the craving, not the food. Amos 6:6 ties the same excess to moral numbness: those who “drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the best oils” are condemned for what they fail to feel, that they “are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph.” In the Gospels the rich man’s soliloquy, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry” (Luke 12:19), is answered not with a lecture on diet but with the reclamation of his life that same night (Luke 12:20); and Luke 21:34 warns that hearts “loaded down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life” lose their readiness for the day that comes.

The New Testament letters place the same behaviour inside a catalogue of the old life. Romans 13:13 sets “reveling and drunkenness” alongside sexual immorality and strife, and the next verse supplies the positive counter-move: “make no provision for the flesh, for its lusts” (Romans 13:14). Philippians 3:19 is the sharpest theological framing, describing people “whose god is the belly” and who “think about earthly things,” while Hebrews 12:16 offers Esau as the type of the profane person who trades an inheritance for “one meal,” and 1 Peter 4:3 lists “drunken binges… carousings” among the desires of the Gentiles already left behind.

Christian traditions have read this material differently. In Catholic moral theology gluttony (gula) is one of the seven capital sins, and — following Aquinas — the sin is located in disordered desire or pleasure rather than in food as such, so that eating hastily, sumptuously, excessively, or fussily can each be a species of it; it is ordinarily treated as a matter for confession and the discipline of fasting rather than for civil penalty, and no Christian body has applied the capital sentence of Deuteronomy 21:21 to it. Many Protestant traditions have spoken less of a distinct “deadly sin” and more of intemperance and idolatry, stressing Philippians 3:19 and stewardship of the body. A further, interpretive suggestion: some modern readers take the prophetic critiques, Amos 6:6 especially, as indictments of complacency and indifference to the poor rather than of private appetite alone — a reading the text’s own link between luxury and unshared grief supports, though traditions weigh how central that emphasis should be differently.

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.