bios

Greek had two everyday words for life, and they split the ground between them. ζωή is life itself, the fact of being alive, and the New Testament reaches for it when it speaks of the life God gives and of life that never ends. This word is the other half: not that someone is alive, but the life they actually live, the years they are given and what those years are filled with.

That is why it shows up in two kinds of sentence. Paul asks Timothy to pray that believers may "lead a quiet and peaceable life," where the word is about how a person conducts themselves day by day. Elsewhere it names this present existence as a whole, a world with its own business and pleasures pressing in: the seed choked by "the cares and riches and pleasures of this life," the soldier told not to get tangled in "the affairs of this life."

Because it is life as lived rather than life as gift, this word never becomes a prize in the New Testament. Nobody is promised it and nobody inherits it. It is simply the life a person has on their hands, and the writers are interested in what gets done with it.

The step from the life a person lives to what they live on is a short one, and Greek took it long before the New Testament. The same word that names someone's life also names their substance: land, money, goods, whatever keeps them going. English once worked this way too, which is why older Bibles have the poor widow giving "all her living."

In the New Testament this is the more common use, and it is almost always pointed:

• Mark and Luke say the widow put in her whole means of living, not two small coins but everything she had to survive on.
• The younger son asks for his share, his father divides the family holdings between the sons, and the boy eats his way through it.
• John asks how anyone who has "the world's goods" can shut his heart against a brother in need.

Two other words sit close by. The estate the father splits is called by a second name in that same sentence (οὐσία), a holding to be divided up; this word looks at the same wealth from the other side, as what a person lives off. That is the translator's problem in miniature: "property" sounds like a deed and "livelihood" sounds like a wage, while the Greek means both at once.