Emporia (ἐμπορία) means commerce or trade — the activity of buying and selling for profit. It comes from emporos (H1713, merchant, one who travels for trade). The word appears in Matthew 22:5 where invited guests dismiss the king's wedding banquet for their business affairs.
Jesus' parable of the wedding banquet (Matthew 22:1-14) uses emporia to describe what competes with the kingdom of God for human attention. The invited guests "paid no attention and went off — one to his field, another to his business [emporia]." This is not villainy — it's ordinariness. The kingdom loses out to the routine. The merchant's busyness is spiritually more dangerous than dramatic rebellion because it requires no decision: just the slow drift of distraction. The Pearl of Great Price parable (Matthew 13:45-46) offers the corrective: the merchant who truly understands sells everything for the one pearl.
The emporos family: emporos (merchant, traveler), emporion (marketplace), emporia (trade). Revelation 18 gives the definitive theological critique of commercial empire: Babylon's fall ends the merchants' trade in everything from gold to "human souls" (18:13). The final item in the cargo list — souls — reveals commerce's darkest potential. Conversely, the merchant who sells all for the pearl is the model disciple.