thaptō

This verb, "thapto", is the plain Greek word for seeing a dead body to its resting place. It covers the whole act: taking charge of the body, carrying it out, and laying it where it will stay. Older Greek used the same word for the funeral as a whole, cremation included, so it names the honoring of the dead rather than the digging of a hole. The separate word for readying a body with cloth and spices (ἐνταφιάζω) describes the preparation; this one describes the burial itself.

Eight of the eleven times it appears, someone is performing that duty for someone else, and the New Testament assumes how heavy the duty was. Burying a parent was the obligation no one in that world would refuse, which is why a would-be follower asking to go and bury his father first sounds so reasonable, and why Jesus' answer is so startling. The same pressure shows up in the small details of narrative: John the Baptist's disciples come for his body, and the young men in Jerusalem carry Ananias and Sapphira straight out to a grave.

The other three times, the word simply records that someone was buried, and that quiet statement is doing real work each time:

• The rich man died and was buried, while the beggar was carried away by angels.
• Peter argues that David was buried and his tomb is still standing in Jerusalem, so David cannot be the one whose body never decayed.
• The earliest summary of the Christian message sets "he was buried" between the death and the resurrection, because a buried man is a man who really died.

Paul does build a picture out of burial, saying believers were buried with Christ in baptism, but he uses a compound form of the word for that (συνθάπτω). This verb stays literal everywhere it appears.