Ephesians5chapter 5

The contrast between being drunk with wine and being filled with the Spirit had a sharp local reference. The rites of Dionysus involved wine and ecstatic behaviour as a religious act, and drunkenness at guild dinners and festivals was ordinary social practice. Paul is not comparing a vice to a virtue so much as one kind of religious ecstasy to another.

The singing that follows — psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs — describes what filled the gathering instead. Communal singing was a feature of banquets too; the content is what changed.

The household code in the second half follows a form Greek and Roman moralists used, addressing the male head of the house about his wife, children, and slaves. Aristotle and others wrote versions of it, and its purpose was to show that a philosophy produced orderly households, which mattered to suspicious neighbours and magistrates.

What is unusual here is who gets addressed. The code opens with mutual submission, speaks to wives directly as moral agents rather than as property, and gives the husband by far the longer instruction — to love as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. Under Roman law a husband held authority over his household; being told to spend himself for it was not the expected use of that authority.