a smell: the scent a thing gives off into the air, pleasant or repellent depending on what is giving it off.
This is the plain Greek word for a smell, the scent that something releases into the air around it. By itself it takes no side. It can name the sweetness of costly perfume or the reek of something rotting, and only the context says which. When a writer wanted to specify that a smell was sweet, Greek had a separate word for exactly that (εὐωδία), and a verb for giving off a bad one (ὄζω).
Only one of its five appearances in the New Testament is an everyday physical smell: the perfume (μύρον) Mary pours over Jesus' feet fills the whole house with its scent. The other four reach back to the altar. "A fragrant offering" in Ephesians 5:2 and Philippians 4:18 is a fixed phrase lifted from the Greek Old Testament, where the smoke of an accepted sacrifice rises as a soothing smell (רֵיחַ). Paul applies that phrase to Christ giving himself up, and to a cash gift sent to a missionary in prison. The offering God welcomes is now a life laid down and a church's generosity, not an animal.
What holds the uses together is the way a smell behaves. It spreads on its own, reaches people who were not looking for it, and is either caught or missed with no arguing about it. That is the point Paul presses hardest in 2 Corinthians, where one and the same scent given off by the apostles' work smells like life to some people and like death to others. The word passes no verdict of its own; the people who catch it do.
Nuances
What background scene controls the smell imagery of 2 Corinthians 2:14-16, where ὀσμή stands alongside θριαμβεύω and εὐωδία.
- contestedThe controlling image is the Roman triumphal procession, in which incense and perfumes were burned along the route; the participle rendered "leads in triumph" in the same clause supplies the setting, and the aroma is the smoke of that parade.; Paul B. Duff, "Metaphor, Motif, and Meaning: The Rhetorical Strategy behind the Image 'Led in Triumph' in 2 Corinthians 2:14," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53 (1991)
- contestedThe controlling image is Israelite sacrifice mediated through the Septuagint, since Paul immediately calls the apostles a fragrance of Christ offered to God, taking up the standard Greek Old Testament phrase for an accepted offering.; Scott J. Hafemann, Suffering and the Spirit: An Exegetical Study of II Cor 2:14-3:3 within the Context of the Corinthian Correspondence, WUNT 2/19 (1986)
- contestedThe two backgrounds are combined rather than exclusive: the procession supplies the scene of being led along in another's triumph, while the sacrificial vocabulary supplies the sense of the aroma itself.; Margaret E. Thrall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, ICC (1994), vol. 1, on 2 Corinthians 2:14-16