euruchōros

The lexicons are unanimous that εὐρύχωρος is a plain spatial adjective. BDAG defines it as pertaining to having ample room, broad, spacious, roomy; the abbreviated LSJ gives roomy, wide; Abbott-Smith gives spacious, broad and notes that in the Septuagint it renders forms of רחב with the single exception of 2 Chronicles 18:9, where it stands for goren, the threshing floor or open place at the city gate. Moulton-Milligan document the cognate noun εὐρυχωρία for an open space in a Tebtunis papyrus (P.Tebt. II.383.17, A.D. 46) and in an Attic inscription, and observe that in the Old Testament the adjective connotes freedom and prosperity, citing Psalm 30:9 LXX, Hosea 4:16 and Isaiah 30:23. Classical and Hellenistic usage is concrete throughout (Aristotle; Diodorus Siculus 19.84, of open ground for deploying troops; Josephus), so no moral coloring is lexical. The interpretive question is confined to Matthew 7:13, where εὐρύχωρος modifies ὁδός while πλατεῖα modifies πύλη, and where the Two Ways schema (Deuteronomy 30:15, 19; Jeremiah 21:8; Psalm 1:6, elaborated in Didache 1-6 and Barnabas 18-20) supplies the moral frame. Davies and Allison caution that the easy versus hard reading can be overplayed and connect the imagery to the familiar scene of a traveler approaching a city gate, comparing the Tabula of Cebes; France treats 7:13-27 as the coda of the Sermon and a call for decision; Luz reads the passage as exhortation within the Two Ways tradition; Hagner notes the text-critical uncertainty over ἡ πύλη in v. 13, which is absent from the original hand of Sinaiticus and several Old Latin witnesses. The most distinctive philological observation is the contrast with the Septuagint broad-place motif, where πλατυσμός at Psalm 17:20 and 117:5 LXX and εὐρύχωρος at Psalm 30:9 LXX render מרחב as an image of deliverance; whether Matthew consciously inverts that motif or draws independently on the Greco-Roman vice-and-virtue road imagery is not addressed head-on in the major commentaries.