ὑδρωπικός

From the study of Luke 14:2

Range of meaning

An adjective from hydrōps ("dropsy"; built on hydōr, "water") describing a person whose body retains abnormal amounts of fluid. The tissues swell, especially the belly, legs and limbs. Ancient physicians treated it as a disease in its own right. Today we see it as a symptom of heart, kidney or liver failure. It was chronic, disfiguring, and often seen as a sign that death was coming. Ancient writers also noted a cruel irony: people with dropsy have a raging thirst, yet drinking only makes the swelling worse.

Against the English

KJV, ESV, NASB, BSB and WEB keep the old word "dropsy" (from Old French idropisie, ultimately from this Greek word). Most modern readers cannot picture it. NIV ("abnormal swelling of his body") and NLT ("arms and legs were swollen") describe the symptom instead. That is clearer, but it drops the fact that the word named a known disease with known associations.

How it drifted

The English word did not change meaning. It went out of everyday use, as medicine began to treat swelling as a symptom of underlying organ failure rather than a disease of its own. The result is that modern readers have no picture to attach to the word.

Used elsewhere in the period

The word is common in the Hippocratic medical writings and later in Galen, which led W. K. Hobart (1882) to call it part of Luke's "medical language". In ordinary literature dropsy was a stock image for greed and endless appetite. Polybius (13.2.2) compares insatiable greed to dropsy. A saying credited to Diogenes the Cynic compares lovers of money to people with dropsy, who crave more water the fuller they are. Horace (Odes 2.2.13–16) and Ovid (Fasti 1.215–216) use the same image for avarice. On the Jewish side, a later rabbinic text (b. Shabbat 33a) links dropsy with sin, but that text is centuries later and only suggestive for the first century. It is not used in the Greek Old Testament.