ogkos

The standard reference works read the word at Hebrews 12:1 in its physical rather than its classical moral sense. BDAG glosses it "impediment, weight, burden"; Louw-Nida place it in the domain of trouble and hardship (22.13) as "hindrance, impediment"; Thayer gives "bulk, mass, hence a burden, weight, encumbrance," distinguishing it from βάρος (mere weight) and φορτίον (a load as borne); LSJ lists the athletic-physical sense (B.II.1, "bulk, weight, trouble") separately from the "pride, pretension" sense (B.II.2) and does not apply the latter to Hebrews; Delling (TDNT 5:41) concludes the sense here is "burden, hindrance," activated by the surrounding sporting language. Lexicography treats the classical word as two etymological homonyms spelled alike, one meaning "barb of an arrow" and the one at issue derived from a root meaning "to carry," hence "that which is carried, bulk" (the medical prefix onco- preserves the clinical sense "swelling, tumor"). Outside the Bible the word regularly meant "self-importance, pomposity" from the tragedians onward, and the New Testament cognate ὑπέρογκος bears that arrogance sense (2 Peter 2:18; Jude 16); the word is absent from the Septuagint. The physical reading is driven by the dense athletic frame of Hebrews 12:1-2 (ἀγών, τρέχωμεν, ἀποθέμενοι, the cloud of witnesses) and by ancient medical usage in which swift running "purges away the bulk of flesh" (Hippocrates, cited by Wetstein; Galen on the athlete's excess σαρκῶν ὄγκος). Modern commentators divide over the concrete referent: excess flesh reduced by training (Dods, Hughes, Wuest), heavy clothing shed at the line (Koester, Lane, Westcott), or a deliberately unspecified encumbrance (Attridge, Bruce, Cockerill, deSilva); the moral "pride" reading is defended by few (Farrar) and rejected by the mainstream. The chief remaining debate is not the word's meaning but how tightly to bind it to the following ἁμαρτία, read either coordinatively as two things laid aside (Bruce, Lane, Cockerill) or epexegetically as one hindrance specified as sin (Ellingworth, Attridge, O'Brien). Pfitzner and Croy are the standard studies of the athletic imagery.