a branch: a limb growing out from the trunk of a tree
The word names an everyday thing: a limb growing out of a tree. It is the part that puts out leaves, takes the weight of a bird, throws shade, and can be cut off and carried away. Greek writers used it of the woody shoot of any tree or bush, and the New Testament adds nothing specialized to it. Wherever it turns up, a real branch is being described or pictured.
What is striking is that almost every occurrence sits inside a picture drawn from one particular tree:
- the mustard plant that grows tall enough for birds to nest in its branches
- the fig tree whose branch turns soft and puts out leaves as summer nears
- the trees along the road into Jerusalem, stripped of branches by the crowd
- the olive tree in Paul's argument, some branches broken off it and others grafted in
Each picture leans on something everyone already knows about branches. They grow out of a root they did not make. They show the season before anyone announces it. They can be cut away.
Romans 11 is the one place where the branches plainly stand for people. Even there the noun is doing ordinary work, and the weight comes from the picture Paul builds around it, in which the root carries the branches and never the reverse. He sharpens the image with a verb for snapping a branch off (ἐκκλάω) and with a gardener's term for grafting a shoot into another tree, so the plainness of the noun is exactly what lets the argument land.
Greek had narrower words when a writer wanted one: the shoot of a vine (κλῆμα), the palm frond (βαΐον), the armful of leafy greenery strewn across a road (στιβάς). This is the general word, and it never tells you what kind of tree, only that a branch is in view.