aulē

In the ancient Mediterranean world a house was not one solid block of rooms. It was built around an open square of ground, walled in and open to the sky, with the rooms facing inward onto it. That open square is what this word names. It was where the cooking fire burned, where servants gathered and waited, and where anyone arriving at the gate was received before being let any further in.

That is why the word sits at the center of the night Jesus was arrested. Peter is not inside a room. He is out in the open with the household staff, warming himself at a fire built in the middle of the yard, close enough to be recognized by a servant girl and far enough from Jesus to deny he ever knew him. Mark even keeps this yard distinct from the entryway just outside it (προαύλιον), which is where Peter retreats after the first denial.

The word covers any walled open space of that kind, so it reaches well beyond houses. Israel's scriptures in Greek already used it for the courts of the tabernacle and the temple, translating the Hebrew word for those courts (חָצֵר). Two other uses follow the same shape:

• a stone pen where a shepherd folds his sheep for the night, closed except for one gate a keeper watches
• the open court that rings the temple sanctuary, where worshippers stand outside the holy building itself

Nothing about the word changes as it moves from one of these to the next. What changes is only what the wall happens to enclose.

Greek let this word slide from the yard to the whole place the yard belonged to. If a wall and its gate were the most visible thing about a substantial property, the word for the enclosure could stand for the buildings and grounds together, much the way English can name a building by its address.

So in a few places the word is not the open yard but the residence itself: the compound where the high priest lived and received the leading men of Jerusalem, the headquarters the Roman governor used in the city (πραιτώριον), and in one of Jesus' pictures the strong place a man guards with weapons in hand so that his goods stay safe.

This is where translators divide, because the yard sense and the residence sense are the same word and only the scene can settle which is meant. At the very same verse one English Bible will read "palace" and another "courtyard," and neither is careless. The word itself does not decide it.