basanos

βάσανος began as a mineralogical term for the black Lydian touchstone used to assay gold (Frisk, Chantraine, and Beekes trace it to Egyptian baḫan, likely through Lydian mediation), was extended metaphorically to any test of genuineness, then narrowed in Athenian legal practice to the πρόκλησις εἰς βάσανον, the interrogation of slaves under torture. By the Hellenistic period it denoted acute suffering generally. The lexica are unanimous (BDAG 168; LSJ s.v.; Schneider, TDNT 1:561-63; Silva, NIDNTTE s.v.; Spicq, TLNT 1 s.v.; Louw-Nida 24.87-88) that the classical "touchstone" and "judicial-examination" senses have disappeared from the New Testament, where only the sense of torment survives; NIDNTTE, following Barr, warns explicitly against smuggling the touchstone etymology back into NT contexts. The Septuagint tips the balance toward experienced torment (rendering Hebrew words for shame, stumbling, and plague), and 4 Maccabees, which uses the word-group more than eighty times for the tortures of the martyrs under Antiochus IV, anchors the NT usage in a martyrological rather than a testing register (deSilva; van Henten). For Luke 16:23, 28 the lexical meaning ("conscious torment") is undisputed; the debated questions concern what the parabolic depiction implies about the intermediate state (Fitzmyer, Marshall, Bovon, Bauckham) and lie outside lexical semantics.