ouranios

BDAG and LSJ gloss οὐράνιος simply as "heavenly, in heaven": a denominative adjective in -ιος formed on οὐρανός, the suffix being relational ("pertaining to heaven") rather than strictly locative. Usage runs from divine epithets in early Greek poetry through Plato's Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία and the οὐράνιος ἔρως of Symposium 180d-e to Philo, for whom the οὐράνιος ἄνθρωπος of Opif. 134 and the οὐράνιος-versus-γήϊνος pairing of Leg. All. 1.31 mark the noetic against the sensible; Josephus prefers the simplex οὐράνιος, whereas the NT writers who want the sharper opposition to ἐπίγειος reach for the compound ἐπουράνιος. The NT distribution is decisive: seven of nine occurrences are the Matthean formula ὁ πατὴρ ὁ οὐράνιος, which stands beside Matthew's commoner ὁ πατὴρ ὁ ἐν (τοῖς) οὐρανοῖς, the two together roughly twenty times against one in Mark. Jonathan Pennington (Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew, NovTSup 126, Brill 2007) reads this idiolect as part of a deliberate heaven-and-earth discourse drawn from Daniel 2-7, connoting divine kingly sovereignty rather than the intimacy usually assumed, and in the same work dismantles the Dalman and Strack-Billerbeck thesis that Matthew's heaven language is a reverential circumlocution for the divine name; Davies and Allison had already moved cautiously in that direction. Traub's TDNT article treats οὐρανός, οὐράνιος and ἐπουράνιος together and observes that the simplex and the compound are largely interchangeable in Philo. At Luke 2:13 the adjective qualifies στρατιά, the standard Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew phrase for the host of heaven, and at Acts 26:19 it is ablatival in force, of a vision originating from heaven.