a stone: a discrete piece of rock, from one small enough to throw to a shaped building block or a cut gem, as opposed to solid bedrock
Lithos is the ordinary Greek word for a stone, in use since Homer and still the plain everyday word of first century shops, building sites, and graveyards. It leans toward stone that has been quarried, cut, or put to some purpose, which is what separates it from the word for native rock and bedrock (πέτρα). Size and value come from the sentence, not from the word.
One word therefore covers a wide spread of objects:
- stones small enough for a crowd to snatch up and throw
- the heavy slab rolled across the doorway of a tomb
- the dressed blocks visitors came to admire in the temple
- the cut gems that stud a crown, a wall, or a merchant's cargo
- the great grinding stone of a mill
- plain stone as raw material, whether carved into an idol or written on as a tablet
The heavily loaded uses are borrowed pictures rather than a second meaning. Three Old Testament lines supply them: the stone the builders rejected that became the chief stone of the corner (Psalm 118:22), the chosen and costly stone God lays in Zion (Isaiah 28:16), and the stone that trips people up (Isaiah 8:14). All three use the Hebrew word for stone (אֶבֶן), which the Greek Old Testament renders with this word, and the three turn up together so often that most scholars think the earliest Christians handled them as a set: they stand side by side in 1 Peter 2, in Romans 9, at the close of the parable of the rented vineyard, and in Peter's speech before the council in Acts 4.
One detail of that picture is lost in Greek. In Hebrew and Aramaic the word for "son" and the word for "stone" sound almost the same, so in the parable the rejected son and the rejected stone chime together. Many scholars take that echo as evidence the quotation belonged to the parable from the beginning, since a Greek speaking church would not have invented a play on words it could not hear.
Nuances
Whether the word rendered "cornerstone" here, taken up from Isaiah 28:16, names a foundation stone laid at a corner or a crowning stone set at the top of the finished building.
- majorityA foundation cornerstone laid at the corner of the base, which fixes the line of the whole structure. The Hebrew of Isaiah 28:16 ties the stone to the foundations of Zion, the Community Rule at Qumran applies that verse to the community as a foundation, and the fact that unbelievers stumble over the stone fits a block at ground level rather than one at the top.; R. J. McKelvey, "Christ the Cornerstone," New Testament Studies 8 (1961-62): 352-359; R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); P. J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); J. H. Elliott, 1 Peter, Anchor Bible 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000); K. H. Jobes, 1 Peter, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005)
- minorityA crowning capstone or keystone set at the top to complete the building, kept distinct from the foundation stone. This reading is now largely abandoned for 1 Peter, though it is still defended by some commentators for the parallel wording in Ephesians 2:20.; J. Jeremias, "Kephale gonias, Akrogoniaios," Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 29 (1930): 264-280; J. Jeremias, "gonia, akrogoniaios, kephale gonias," TDNT 1:791-793; A. T. Lincoln, Ephesians, Word Biblical Commentary 42 (Dallas: Word, 1990)