katapinō

The lexica are agreed on this compound of πίνω and treat it as a single polysemous item rather than as homonyms. BDAG divides it into a literal sense ("to swallow something", Matthew 23:24) and a figurative extension ("to cause the ruin of someone, swallow up, devour, consume"), gathering under the latter both the natural agents (the sea at Hebrews 11:29, the earth at Revelation 12:16), the personal aggressor (1 Peter 5:8), the overwhelming of a person by grief (2 Corinthians 2:7), and the passive eschatological uses (1 Corinthians 15:54; 2 Corinthians 5:4). LSJ documents the same range in classical and Hellenistic authors, including the extended senses of engulfing and of squandering property, and Moulton-Milligan cite the ordinary papyrus usage. Louw and Nida accordingly place the word in two domains, one physiological and one of destruction. The figurative range is not a Christian development: the Greek Old Testament uses καταπίνω as the standard rendering of Hebrew בלע across the same spectrum, from the earth swallowing Korah's company to the Isaianic promise that death will be swallowed forever. That Septuagintal channel is why the New Testament usage clusters as it does. At 1 Corinthians 15:54 the citation formula κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος does not match the Old Greek of Isaiah 25:8 but agrees with the later revisers associated with Theodotion, a text-form question discussed at length by Thiselton; the divergence is text-critical and does not bear on the meaning of the verb. Attridge notes that Hebrews 11:29 draws on the Exodus 15 sea tradition, where the same verb serves. On 2 Corinthians 5:4 Harris observes that the passive construction reverses the usual polarity of the verb: the swallower is ζωή, so the verb of destruction becomes a verb of salvation. No standard reference work registers a dispute about the word's semantic range.