a bed or couch: the low, liftable frame a person stretches out on, whether to sleep, to lie ill, or to recline at a meal
A bed in the ancient world was not what a modern reader pictures. It was a low frame, strung with cords or webbing and topped with a pad, sitting close to the floor and light enough that a few people could carry it with someone still lying on it. One object did several jobs, and one Greek word covers all of them.
The nine New Testament uses spread across those jobs:
- something small enough to hide a burning lamp under (Mark 4:21, Luke 8:16)
- where two people are lying on the night everything is decided (Luke 17:34)
- what a paralyzed man arrives on, and is then told to pick up and take home (Matthew 9:2, Matthew 9:6, Luke 5:18)
- where a mother finds her daughter resting once the demon has gone (Mark 7:30)
- the dining couches a strict household scrubbed along with its cups and pots (Mark 7:4)
The healing stories show three writers naming one object three different ways. Matthew uses this ordinary word for the paralyzed man's bedding, Mark uses the blunt street word for a cheap mat (κράβαττος), and Luke swaps in a tidier little word meaning a small couch (κλινίδιον). Nothing about the object changes between the accounts. Only the level of the vocabulary does.
Revelation 2:22 turns the furniture into a threat. A woman who has been using a bed for adultery is told God will throw her onto one, and the bed she lands on is a sickbed. The Greek keeps the same word for both, so the punishment lands in the very word that named the sin.
Nuances
Whether the phrase "and couches" belongs to the original text of Mark 7:4.
- contestedOriginal, but doubtful enough to print in brackets: the phrase is widely attested and a scribe could easily have dropped it as an odd thing to immerse.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., at Mark 7:4
- contestedA later addition: the phrase is absent from several of the oldest and best manuscripts, and looks like an expansion of the list of washed objects.; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8, Anchor Yale Bible 27, at Mark 7:4