merimna

BDAG and LSJ give the noun a single sense, "anxiety, worry, care," with the valence supplied by the object rather than by the lexeme, and the six New Testament instances divide by exactly that object: five concern the subject's own circumstances, one (2 Corinthians 11:28) the welfare of others. Bultmann's TDNT article (IV.589 to 593) traces the classical and Hellenistic range from the tragedians onward and reads the Synoptic material existentially, as self-securing care that is to be surrendered; Spicq's Theological Lexicon and NIDNTTE supply the papyrological and Hellenistic-Jewish evidence for the word as ordinary burdensome preoccupation. On the parable of the sower, Davies and Allison, Marshall, and the standard Mark commentaries agree that the cares of the present age function as rivals to the word rather than as a purely emotional state, the choking verb συμπνίγω making the competition for room explicit; Luke 21:34 attaches the same cares, qualified as belonging to this life, to the weighing down of the heart. On 1 Peter 5:7 Michaels and Jobes identify a deliberate echo of Psalm 55:22 in its Greek form, where this same noun renders the Hebrew יְהָב and the imperative ἐπιρίπτω is shared, which grounds the transferable-burden nuance in a Septuagint model rather than in Petrine coinage. At 2 Corinthians 11:28 Harris and Thrall take the genitive as objective, Paul's anxious concern for all the churches, and note the tension with Philippians 4:6 that has led a minority to hear a confessed weakness rather than an apostolic burden; the harder crux in that verse is the neighbouring ἐπίστασις, not this noun. On etymology, Chantraine and Frisk connect the word with the μέρμερος and μερμηρίζω family of anxious pondering and reject derivation from μερίζω "to divide," the supposed source of the homiletical "divided mind" image.