StrongerBible

mnēma

μνῆμα

GreekG3418tomb, grave, ...

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mrk 5:3Mrk 5:5Luk 8:27Luk 23:53Luk 24:1Act 2:29Act 7:16Rev 11:9
Root family
Word studyMNAY-mahnoun

What mnēma means

a tomb: a grave or rock-cut burial chamber, named as the lasting marker of the person laid there

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

The word belongs to the family of Greek words for remembering, and it names the thing that keeps a dead person in mind: the tomb. In ordinary use that memory idea has faded into the background, and the word simply means the place where a body is laid, whether a cave, a grave, or a chamber cut into rock and sealed with a stone.

All eight New Testament uses point to a real burial place. Luke says the body of Jesus was laid in a tomb cut from rock where no one had ever lain, and that the women came to that tomb at first light. Stephen speaks of the tomb Abraham bought at Shechem. Peter, preaching at Pentecost, can point to the tomb of David as a landmark still standing in Jerusalem, which is his proof that David was speaking of someone other than himself. In Revelation the watching crowds refuse to let the bodies of the two witnesses be put in a tomb, an insult that would have been felt as one of the worst. And in Mark and Luke the tombs outside the Gerasene town are a plural place, a hillside of burial caves, and that is where the man nobody could bind makes his home, night and day among the dead.

Greek had a second and far more common word for the same thing, μνημεῖον, built from the same root, and the two are close to interchangeable. Luke uses this word for the tomb of Jesus in one verse and that other word for the very same tomb two verses later, and some manuscripts swap one for the other. A third word, τάφος, comes instead from the verb for burying, so it leans on the act of burial rather than on the marker left standing.

Mrk 5:3Mrk 5:5Luk 8:27Luk 23:53Luk 24:1Act 2:29Act 7:16Rev 11:9

What scholars say about mnēma

Standard lexica treat μνῆμα as a noun of the μιμνῄσκομαι / μνάομαι word group, formed with the -μα suffix and denoting first a memorial or monument and then, in Hellenistic usage, the sepulchre itself (BDAG; LSJ). All eight New Testament occurrences fall under the concrete sense, as Abbott-Smith's arrangement makes explicit, and Louw and Nida assign μνῆμα and μνημεῖον together to a single semantic domain of burial places, treating them as functionally equivalent. O. Michel's TDNT treatment of the μνῆμα / μνημεῖον group observes that the memorial nuance is etymologically primary while the Gospels use both words for the concrete rock-cut chamber. The textual tradition confirms their interchangeability: the Textus Receptus reads μνημείοις for μνήμασιν at Mark 5:3, and the Byzantine and Alexandrian traditions differ over which of the two stands at several Markan burial texts. The distribution is Lukan, with five of the eight occurrences in Luke and Acts.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. μνῆμαlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. μνῆμαlexicon
  • G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (1937), s.v. μνῆμαlexicon
  • J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (1989), 7.75lexicon
  • O. Michel, "μνῆμα, μνημεῖον," TDNT 4:679-680theological-dictionary

All attested forms of μνῆμα

dative n p

μνήμασιν

Mrk 5:3, Mrk 5:5, Luk 8:27

accusative n s

μνῆμα

Luk 24:1, Rev 11:9

dative n s

μνήματι

Luk 23:53, Act 7:16

nominative n s

μνῆμα

Act 2:29