1 Timothy 5:6 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth. — This is a thoroughly Pauline thought, set forth in other language in the Roman Epistle, Romans 8:13 : “For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die.” The word in the Greek rendered “she that liveth in pleasure” is very remarkable, and in the New Testament is found only in one other place (James 5:5). The widow-woman who could so forget her sorrow and her duty is spoken of as a living corpse, and sharply contrasted with her far happier sister, who, dead to the pleasures of the flesh, living a life of prayer and of self-denial, in the true sense of the word, may be spoken of as living. A very different estimate of life was held by the greatest of Greek poets, who writes thus of men giving up pleasures: “I do not consider that such a one lives, but I regard him as a living corpse” (Antigone of Sophocles, 1166-7, Dindorf). Comp., too, Revelation 3:1.