StrongerBible

onar

ὄναρ

GreekG3677“dream”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 1:20Mat 2:12Mat 2:13Mat 2:19Mat 2:22Mat 27:19
Word studyResearch-gradeOH-narnoun

What onar means

a dream: what a person sees while asleep, and in Matthew always the channel God uses to deliver a message or warning

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is the ordinary Greek word for a dream, but in the New Testament it turns up only six times, all in Matthew, and always inside the set phrase "in a dream." Five of the six occur in the birth stories: God tells Joseph in a dream to take Mary as his wife, warns the wise men not to return to Herod, sends Joseph to Egypt and later home again, and finally steers the family to Nazareth. The sixth comes at Jesus' trial, where Pilate's wife has suffered over Jesus in a dream and sends word that he is innocent.

Every one of these is a revelatory dream, not the stray imagery of ordinary sleep. It is the door through which God announces what he is about to do, and in each case the sleeper wakes and acts on it. The dream is not itself the point; its fulfillment in waking life is. That old contrast between the dream at night and its coming true by day runs quietly under all six scenes.

Matthew's choice of word is pointed. The Greek Old Testament had used a different word for the famous dreams of Jacob, Joseph, and Daniel, but Matthew reaches instead for the everyday term of his own day, one that carried a strong sense of a message about the future. Through this small, common word he tells his readers that God has been guiding events from the very start.

Mat 1:20Mat 2:12Mat 2:13Mat 2:19Mat 2:22Mat 27:19

Disputed

Whether Matthew's choice of ὄναρ over the Septuagint's ἐνύπνιον carries a technical, future-oriented nuance marking these as predictive dreams, or is simply the ordinary Koine idiom of his day.

  • majorityThe phrase κατ' ὄναρ was just coming into vogue in the imperial East and carries no technical predictive force; ancient authors use the several dream-words interchangeably, and the supposed ὄναρ/ἐνύπνιον distinction is not generally observed.; Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. ὄναρ; W. V. Harris, Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity (2009)
  • minorityMatthew deliberately chose ὄναρ to signal a future-oriented, prophetic dream, ruling out any merely physiological reading, along the lines of the distinction Artemidorus later drew.; W. Subash, The Dreams of Matthew 1:18-2:23 (Peter Lang, 2012)

What scholars say about onar

Lexicons agree that ὄναρ is a defective neuter noun attested only in the nominative and accusative singular, with the remaining cases supplied by the fully inflected ὄνειρος (LSJ; BDAG; Oepke, TDNT 5:220-238). As an old accusative of respect it early served adverbially, "in a dream," and stood in a Homeric antithesis with ὕπαρ, "waking reality" (Odyssey 19.547; 20.90), a promise-and-fulfillment vector Matthew exploits. Matthew never uses the bare noun but always the prepositional phrase κατ' ὄναρ, a post-classical Koine formula the Atticist Phrynichus (Ecloga 395) condemned and which Moulton-Milligan found in votive inscriptions rather than papyri. The Septuagint rendered Hebrew חֲלוֹם almost always by ἐνύπνιον, so Matthew's diction is Hellenistic and non-Septuagintal; Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Josephus (Bellum 3.351-354) similarly reach for the classical vocabulary. On the form of the dreams, Gnuse (NovT 32, 1990: 97-120) analyzes Matthew's infancy dreams as ancient Near Eastern message dreams, while Davies-Allison (ICC), Hagner (WBC), Keener, and Allison (The New Moses, 1993) stress a Moses and Amram typology drawing on Josephus, Antiquities 2.212-216. Dodson (Reading Dreams, LNTS 397, 2006), building on Hanson (ANRW II.23.2), reads the cycle against Greco-Roman literary dream conventions and the encomiastic birth-topos. Whether Matthew intends the technical predictive nuance Artemidorus (Oneirocritica 1.1) later assigned to ὄνειρος over against ἐνύπνιον is disputed; LSJ notes that this distinction is not generally observed except by Philo, and Harris (Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity, 2009) shows the ancient sources use the dream-words interchangeably. On Matthew 27:19, Luz (Hermeneia), Senior (BETL 39, 1982), and Bond (SNTSMS 100, 1998) read Pilate's wife's dream as genuine divine revelation forming an inclusio with the infancy dreams.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. ὄναρlexicon
  • BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. ὄναρlexicon
  • A. Oepke, "ὄναρ," TDNT 5:220-238theological-dictionary
  • J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. ὄναρlexicon
  • R. K. Gnuse, "Dream Genre in the Matthean Infancy Narratives," Novum Testamentum 32 (1990): 97-120article
  • W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (ICC), vol. 1commentary
  • D. C. Allison, The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (1993)monograph
  • D. S. Dodson, Reading Dreams: An Audience-Critical Approach to the Dreams in the Gospel of Matthew (LNTS 397, 2006)monograph
  • W. V. Harris, Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity (2009)monograph
  • U. Luz, Matthew 21-28 (Hermeneia)commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of ὄναρ

accusative n s

ὄναρ

Mat 1:20, Mat 2:12, Mat 2:13, Mat 2:19, Mat 2:22, Mat 27:19