the earlier of the day's two main meals: a daytime meal, usually around midday, set against the main evening dinner
In the world of the New Testament this word names the earlier of the two meals that mattered, the one eaten in the daytime, most often around noon. Its natural partner and opposite is the evening dinner (δεῖπνον), which was the larger, more formal meal of the day. Luke 14:12 sets the two side by side ("when you give a lunch or a dinner"), and the pairing sweeps in the whole range of meals to which a host might invite guests.
The word once meant something narrower. In the oldest Greek it was the meal taken at daybreak, but by the classical period it had already slid forward to the midday meal, and that is where it sits in the first century. Because of that history, the surrounding story, not the word itself, tells a reader how big or formal the meal was. It can be an ordinary midday meal at a home (Luke 11:38) or, when the occasion supplies the scale, a lavish celebration with slaughtered oxen and fattened cattle (Matthew 22:4).
So the single thread running through every use is timing and rank: this is the daytime meal, the one that is not the main evening event. Everything else, whether it is light and functional or heaped and festive, comes from the setting.
Nuances
How formal the meal at Luke 11:37-38 was: an ordinary daytime meal, or a formal reclining occasion of the kind normally reserved for the evening dinner.
- minorityA relatively ordinary mid-morning or midday meal, without the trappings of a formal banquet.; J. Nolland, Luke 9:21-18:34 (WBC 35B; Word, 1993), 662
- majorityA formal reclining meal, since the guests recline and the scene follows the shape of the evening banquet even though it falls in the daytime.; F. Bovon, Luke 2 (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2013), ad loc.; J. A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV (AB 28A; Doubleday, 1985), 942-948
Why Matthew calls a royal wedding feast an ariston (a daytime-meal word) when such banquets were normally evening dinners.
- majorityA general festive term for a banquet, not to be pressed for time of day; Matthew's heightened imagery of oxen and fatlings, not the word, supplies the grandeur.; W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, Matthew, vol. 3 (ICC; T&T Clark, 1997), ad 22:4; R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT; Eerdmans, 2007), 823-824
- minorityA genuine daytime feast, the opening meal of a multi-day celebration that runs on into an evening banquet.; J. A. Broadus, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (1886), ad 22:4
Disputed
Whether the New Testament noun ever carries the older sense "breakfast" (a morning meal) or only the midday or general daytime meal.
- minorityThe older "breakfast" sense is still in play, and Luke 14:12 pairs the word against the evening dinner in that earlier sense.; BDAG, 3rd ed. (2000), 131, s.v.
- majorityThe New Testament knows only "a meal" or the "noon meal"; "breakfast" is not a New Testament sense.; J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (1989), 23.22, 23.23