to be lying down: stretched out and staying there, either laid up in bed because of illness or lying on a couch at a meal.
The picture behind this word is simple: a body stretched out rather than standing or sitting. It describes a settled condition rather than the moment of going down, so in a story it fills in the background before anything happens. Someone is already down, and stays down.
Ancient life put people in that position for two very different reasons, and the scene alone tells you which one is meant:
- a fever, a mat, or a crowd of invalids beside a pool, and the word means laid up sick
- a host, a table, food, or a woman with a jar of perfume, and it means lying at a formal meal
The dining half needs a picture most modern readers do not have. At a formal ancient meal, guests did not sit on chairs. They lay on couches set around three sides of the room, propped on the left elbow, eating with the right hand from shared dishes on low tables. That posture is why a woman could reach Jesus's feet while he ate at a Pharisee's house, and why another could reach his head at Bethany. Greek had several words for it, the nearest being another verb for lying at table (ἀνάκειμαι), which Matthew tends to use where Mark and Luke use this one.
The word itself is plain and carries no weight of its own. What the writers build around it is another matter. In the healing stories the settled lying is set against the command to get up and walk, and at the meals it is the fact that Jesus lies down alongside tax collectors and outsiders that the onlookers cannot get past.
Nuances
How cultic the temple meal of 1 Corinthians 8:10 was, and therefore what the reclining amounted to.
- majorityA genuinely religious banquet: formal dining in a temple's own dining rooms, where the meal carried real idolatrous associations. Excavated dining rooms fitted with stone couches at the Corinthian sanctuaries make the setting concrete.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (Eerdmans, 2014); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 2000); John Fotopoulos, Food Offered to Idols in Roman Corinth (Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Bruce W. Winter, After Paul Left Corinth (Eerdmans, 2001); Nancy Bookidis and Ronald S. Stroud, The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore: Topography and Architecture, Corinth XVIII.3 (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1997)
- minorityOrdinary social dining that happened to take place on temple grounds, with the strictly cultic character of such meals much weaker than is often assumed.; Wendell Lee Willis, Idol Meat in Corinth: The Pauline Argument in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 (Scholars Press, 1985); Peter D. Gooch, Dangerous Food: 1 Corinthians 8-10 in Its Context (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1993)