Grief in this world was performed, out where everyone could watch it. Mourners struck their own chests, wailed, and kept it up, usually as a crowd and sometimes with professionals hired to lead the noise. This word names that act rather than the sorrow behind it, which is why it fits people whose loss is raw and people going through the expected motions alike.
Because it is an act, it can be called for, joined, or refused. That is the point of the children's game Jesus describes: one group sang a funeral song, and the others would not play the mourners.
The New Testament then stretches the act well past a deathbed, keeping its shape across very different scenes:
- the household around a dead girl, weeping and striking themselves as the mourning begins
- the women along the road to the cross, beating their breasts for a man who is still walking
- every tribe of the earth, wailing at the sight of the Son of Man coming on the clouds
- the kings of a burning city, beating their breasts as they watch the smoke go up
The last two reach back to a prophecy of Zechariah, where the people look on one they have pierced and mourn for him. Revelation borrows the funeral wail again for the fall of a whole civilization, so a rite invented for one body is turned on an empire.
Three neighboring words divide the labor of grief between them: one names the settled state of mourning (πενθέω), one names the dirge sung over the dead (θρηνέω), and one names weeping and tears (κλαίω). This word names what the mourner does with his own body.
Nuances
2ato mourn a death: the beating of the breast and wailing expected of mourners over someone who has died
Mat 11:17Luk 8:52Luk 23:27
2bto wail over a catastrophe: the same public mourning turned toward a disaster, one already fallen or one arriving
Mat 24:30*Rev 1:7*Rev 18:9
Rev 1:7
Whether the mourning of all the tribes of the earth at Christ's appearing in Revelation 1:7 (and its parallel in Matthew 24:30) is penitential grief that ends in their turning to God, or the despairing lament of those facing judgment.
- contestedThe mourning is penitential. The Zechariah 12:10-14 oracle it quotes issues in cleansing, and Revelation elsewhere anticipates the nations coming to worship, so the wail belongs to the conversion of the nations.; Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy
- contestedThe mourning is the dismay of the unrepentant. Those who pierced him lament at the arrival of the judge, in continuity with the lament of the kings and merchants over Babylon later in the book.; David E. Aune, Revelation 1-5, WBC