to spin: to draw raw wool or flax out into a strand and twist it by hand into thread
Spinning was the first real step in making cloth. A worker took a heap of washed wool, flax, or goat hair, teased a few fibers out with the fingers, and twisted them onto a weighted stick until they held together as a continuous thread. Only after that could the thread go onto a loom and become woven cloth (ὑφαντός). This word names that one step and nothing else, which is why the standard lexicons give it a single meaning and leave it there.
In the Greek Old Testament the word belongs almost entirely to one scene: the women who supplied the fabric for Israel's wilderness tent of worship, spinning the dyed wool and the goat hair with their own hands. The Hebrew verb it stands in for there (טָוָה) means exactly the same thing. Spinning was skilled, patient, endless work, and in that world it was work women did.
In the New Testament the word turns up twice, both times in a single saying of Jesus about the wildflowers: they neither toil nor spin, and yet God dresses them better than Solomon in all his finery. The other verb in that pair (κοπιάω) is the word for grinding, sweaty labor of the kind done out in the open, while spinning was the work done indoors at home. Readers from at least the fourth century onward have heard the two verbs as one matched pair, naming everyone's work at once: what the men did and what the women did.
The verb itself was plain, ordinary street Greek. Teachers of the period who prized older, more elegant Greek actually disapproved of it and recommended earlier alternatives. That is part of why it shows up in the Greek Bible: it was simply the word people used.
Whether Matthew 6:28 originally read "they neither card nor spin" rather than the received "how they grow, they neither toil nor spin."
- majorityThe received wording stands. The odd reading is a singular slip by scribe A of Codex Sinaiticus, who anticipated the following spinning verb, wrote a carding verb instead, and corrected himself immediately against his exemplar; P.Oxy. 655 is fragmentary and heavily restored, and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas lacks the material entirely, so it cannot be cross-checked. The reference to natural growth is also integral to the argument of the passage.; Dirk Jongkind, "'The Lilies of the Field' Reconsidered: Codex Sinaiticus and the Gospel of Thomas," Novum Testamentum 48/3 (2006): 209-16; Robert H. Gundry, "Spinning the Lilies and Unraveling the Ravens: An Alternative Reading of Q 12:22b-31 and P.Oxy. 655," New Testament Studies 48 (2002): 159-80; D. C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World's Oldest Bible (London: British Library, 2010), 107; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: UBS, 1994), at Matt 6:28
- minorityThe older reading was "they neither card nor spin," a tight pair of textile-preparation verbs preserved by the original hand of Codex Sinaiticus and independently by P.Oxy. 655 (Gospel of Thomas 36); the carding verb was corrupted into the growth verb early in the transmission of Q, before Matthew and Luke wrote.; T. C. Skeat, "The Lilies of the Field," Zeitschrift fuer die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 37 (1938): 211-14; James M. Robinson and Christoph Heil, "Zeugnisse eines schriftlichen, griechischen vorkanonischen Textes: Mt 6,28b, P.Oxy. 655 (EvTh 36) und Q 12,27," ZNW 89 (1998): 30-44; Robinson, Hoffmann, Kloppenborg, eds., The Critical Edition of Q (Minneapolis: Fortress; Leuven: Peeters, 2000), at Q 12:27
Disputed
Whether pairing the verb for toiling with the verb for spinning was meant as a matched pair of men's work and women's work, so that the saying deliberately takes in the whole audience.
- majorityThe pairing is a deliberate gender doublet: outdoor field labor stands for the men, spinning for the women, so the saying addresses both halves of the audience at once. Spinning was the most strongly gender-marked activity in Roman Palestine and the wider Mediterranean, and the reading is already attested in a late-fourth-century homily on Matthew, so it is not a modern projection. Q shows the same paired technique elsewhere.; John S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 97; Sara Parks, Gender in the Rhetoric of Jesus: Women in Q (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), ch. 4; William E. Arnal, "Gendered Couplets in Q and Legal Formulations: From Rhetoric to Social Source," Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 75-94; Miriam B. Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), chs. 3-5; Pseudo-Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 22.1 (PG 57:298)
- minorityThe pairing is not a genuine gender doublet. The birds and the flowers are said NOT to perform these labors, so the verbs function negatively rather than as a survey of human work, and building a picture of Jesus as a reformer of gender roles on such couplets outruns the evidence.; Dieter T. Roth, The Parables in Q (LNTS 582; London: T&T Clark, 2018), 201; Kathleen E. Corley, Women and the Historical Jesus: Feminist Myths of Christian Origins (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2002)