the main, formal meal of the day: a banquet or dinner to which guests are invited
By the first century this word named the principal, formal meal of the day: the banquet or dinner-party to which guests were invited. Earlier Greek had sometimes used it for the noon meal, but the time of day had faded from the word, so an invitation now had to state the hour separately. What the word carried was the kind of meal, not the clock: the elaborate, hosted event, as opposed to the lighter, earlier meal of the day (ἄριστον).
Such a meal was the most public stage a person had. Guests reclined on couches ranked from the place of highest honor on down, so where you sat announced your standing, and being invited at all marked you as belonging. This is why the ordinary word for dinner carries so much weight in the Gospels: Jesus attacks the scramble for the best seats at banquets, and tells of a host whose great banquet is spurned by the very people first invited.
The same everyday word does heavy work across the New Testament:
- Herod's lavish birthday banquet becomes the scene of John the Baptist's death.
- The great banquet in Jesus' parable pictures God's open invitation, refused by the invited and thrown open instead to the poor.
- The last meal Jesus shares in John's Gospel is where he washes his followers' feet, turning the honor-code of the table upside down.
- The Corinthian church's shared meal, meant to belong to the Lord, has splintered along lines of wealth.
- Revelation sets two great suppers side by side: the wedding feast of the Lamb, and the grim feast where birds eat the flesh of the fallen.
In every case the plain word for a formal meal is doing the work. Because a banquet was where honor, welcome, and community were on public display, it became the natural picture for God's end-time celebration and for the shared life of Jesus' followers gathered at one table.