neos

In this meaning the word describes a thing by its age rather than its kind: it has only lately come to be, so it is fresh and unspent, standing over against whatever is old or worn out. That is why it fits both a literal picture and a spiritual one with the same force.

The literal picture is fresh wine still working in the vat, or a batch of dough just mixed. The figurative uses carry the same idea of recency: the fresh self a believer has put on, the newly cut batch of dough the church is meant to be, the covenant only lately inaugurated through Jesus.

Worth noticing is what this word does not stress. Greek has a second word, kainos, for what is new in kind or unheard of before. This word points instead to what is simply recent. The two overlap in practice, and the New Testament writers often use them side by side, but the shade here is freshness in time, not novelty of type.

Applied to people rather than things, the same idea of recency becomes youth: someone who has not been alive long. English needs a different word here, young or younger, though the underlying sense is the same as the freshness meaning.

The comparative form, best rendered younger, does most of the work in this meaning. Sometimes it is genuinely relative, as with the younger son set beside his elder brother. Often it marks a whole group, the juniors of a community set over against its elders or overseers, as when the younger are told to submit to those who lead. The Pastoral Letters use it repeatedly for younger men and younger women, and for the younger widows whose situation the writer treats differently from that of older ones.