This is the word's plain, everyday sense, the meaning it carried all over the Greek-speaking world long before the New Testament. Built from the verb meaning "to owe (ὀφείλω)," it names the thing that is owed: the principal of a loan, an unpaid wage, a tax still due. It is the word a lender wrote on a contract and a clerk entered in a ledger.
In the New Testament this literal sense appears once, in a workaday illustration: a wage earned by labor is owed to the worker, not handed to him as a favor. The point turns on the ordinary force of the word. What is owed can be claimed; a gift cannot. Greek writers could stretch the word to cover a debt of honor or gratitude, but the picture underneath was always the repayable loan.
Rom 4:4
2
sin pictured as a debt owed to God
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong
Here the same debt-word is used for sin. This is not a meaning Greek itself ever developed. In ordinary Greek the word never drifted from money into morality. The bridge comes from Aramaic, the everyday language Jesus spoke, where one word covered both a financial debt and a moral wrong, so that to sin was to fall into debt before God and to be forgiven was to have that debt released.
The Lord's Prayer carries this idiom straight over into Greek. To ask God to forgive our debts is to ask him to cancel what our sins have run up against him, and the prayer ties our own release to the way we release those who have wronged us. Matthew himself shows that sin, not money, is in view: two verses later he restates the same petition using the plain word for moral wrongdoing (παράπτωμα), and Luke's version of the prayer simply swaps in the ordinary word for sins (ἁμαρτία).
The image is not merely a figure of speech. Behind it lies the sense that a real account has been kept and a real release is being asked for, the cancellation of an obligation no one could repay.
Mat 6:12*
Mat 6:12
Whether the petition envisions only moral forgiveness (sin as debt) or also a literal release of monetary debt.
majorityThe debt is purely moral. Matthew's own gloss in 6:14-15 substitutes the word for trespasses, and the petition assumes the one praying has debtors of his own, which a Jubilee debt-release does not.; John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 290-293; Marius J. Nel, "The Forgiveness of Debt in Matthew 6:12, 14-15," Neotestamentica 47.1 (2013): 87-106
minorityA literal economic dimension is also in view, with debt-cancellation or Jubilee resonance alongside moral forgiveness.; Sharon H. Ringe, Jesus, Liberation, and the Biblical Jubilee (Fortress, 1985), pp. 34-36; Brant Pitre, "The Lord's Prayer and the New Exodus," Letter & Spirit 2 (2006): 69-96
Names the concrete thing owed, the specific amount that stands on the account: a wage counted out as earned pay rather than handed over as a gift.Rom 4:4
Is the word Jesus puts in the mouth of the person praying for sins, so a wrong done to God is spoken of directly as an amount owed him.Mat 6:12
Both
Both name what one party owes another, and English Bibles give both as "debt".Mat 18:32Mat 6:12
Both belong to the plain vocabulary of paying and reckoning, where what is due gets handed over or counted to someone's account.Rom 13:7Rom 4:4
Both appear where the debt is released instead of collected, the one owed letting the whole thing go.Mat 18:32Mat 6:12
Reaches well past money to whatever is owed as a duty: the taxes and revenue owed to a government, and the respect and honor owed to those who hold office.Rom 13:7
Names an obligation that belongs to a relationship rather than to an account, such as what a husband and wife owe each other.1Co 7:3
Works in the plural for a whole bundle of different things owed at once, so a single word covers payments and deference together in one command.Rom 13:7
ὀφειλέτηςnames the person who owes, the debtor, rather than the debt itself; in the Lord's Prayer it is our debtors we forgive
Names the thing owed, the sum standing against an account, so it can be set opposite a gift: a worker's pay is not credited as a favor but counted as what is due to him, something he can rightly claim.Rom 4:4
Measures an obligation without blaming anybody: in the picture of wages nobody has done wrong, there is simply something outstanding that has to be paid.Rom 4:4
Both
Both come straight out of the everyday world of borrowing and lending, and the New Testament turns that money picture into a way of speaking about sin before God: in the Lord's Prayer the wrongs are "debts" and the people who have wronged us are "debtors".Mat 6:12
Both stand under the same verb of release: the prayer asks God to cancel what we owe him and in the same breath describes us cancelling what others owe us, so letting go rather than collecting is what happens to each.Mat 6:12
Names the person who owes rather than the amount owed, which lets it cover anyone bound to do something: Paul says he owes the good news to Greeks and to those outside Greek culture, warns that a man who takes on circumcision is bound to keep the whole law, calls the Gentile churches bound to help the poor believers in Jerusalem, and says we are under no such obligation to our old cravings.Rom 1:14Gal 5:3Rom 15:27Rom 8:12
Because it labels a person, it can amount to calling someone guilty: Jesus asks whether the people killed when the tower in Siloam fell were worse offenders than everyone else living in Jerusalem.Luk 13:4
Puts a party inside the story of a loan, someone who can be summoned, can beg for time, and can be handed over or released: the servant brought to his king owing ten thousand talents.Mat 18:24
ὀφείλωthe verb "to owe" from which this noun is built; it covers the act of owing, not the amount owed
ἁμαρτίαthe ordinary word for sin as missing the mark or wrongdoing; Luke's Lord's Prayer uses this where Matthew keeps the debt-image
Can mean a literal, lawful debt, what one party genuinely owes another, including a wage due to a worker for labor done.Rom 4:4
Both
Both name a wrong against God that must be released and forgiven: the Lord's Prayer asks God to cancel our debts, where the parallel petition asks him to forgive our sins.Mat 6:12Luk 11:4
Both fit the bookkeeping picture of guilt as something reckoned to a person's account, which God in grace declines to charge.Rom 4:4Rom 4:8
Pictures wrongdoing as an unpaid debt: something owed that the wronged party can either collect or cancel, which is why it pairs so naturally with the language of release and forgiveness.Mat 6:12
Keeps its plain commercial meaning of what is rightfully owed, with no moral failure in view at all: the wage a worker has earned is his due, not a gift.Rom 4:4
Both
Both name an offense that one person commits against another (or against God) and that the offended party is asked to forgive, so much so that the Lord's Prayer states the petition with one word and explains it with the other in the very next breath.Mat 6:12Mat 6:14
Pictures wrongdoing as a false step or fall off the right path, a slip away from where one should have stood rather than a balance owed.Rom 5:15Gal 6:1
Carries the weight of humanity's defining fall and its deadly consequence: Adam's single trespass that brought condemnation, and the trespasses in which people are spiritually dead.Rom 5:18Eph 2:1Eph 2:5
What scholars say about opheilēma
Lexicons agree the word fundamentally means "the thing owed," a commercial and legal term with no native religious sense in Greek (LSJ; Hauck, TDNT V:559-566; BDAG; Louw-Nida). The documentary papyri (Moulton-Milligan; Spicq) show it as the everyday word for the principal of a loan, which makes the Lord's Prayer image of remitting debts vivid and concrete. Romans 4:4 uses this literal sense, read by Cranfield, Moo, Dunn, Fitzmyer, Jewett, and Schreiner as a marketplace maxim setting a wage owed against a gift freely given. Matthew 6:12 uses a metaphorical sense of sin as debt that entered Greek from Aramaic, where one word (chôbâ) covered both debt and sin by the first century; the Aramaic background is accepted by virtually every major Matthew commentator (Davies-Allison, Luz, Hagner, Nolland, France, Keener) and rests on Jeremias's reconstruction, with Matthew's own gloss in 6:14-15 and Luke's parallel in 11:4 as the internal evidence.
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
Friedrich Hauck, "ὀφείλω, ὀφειλή, ὀφείλημα, ὀφειλέτης," TDNT, vol. 5 (Eerdmans), pp. 559-566theological-dictionary
Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. ὀφείλημαlexicon
BDAG, 3rd ed., s.v. ὀφείλημαlexicon
J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri, s.v. ὀφείλημαlexicon
Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (Hendrickson, 1994), vol. 2, s.v. ὀφειλέτης κτλ.theological-dictionary
W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, ICC, vol. 1 (T&T Clark, 1988), pp. 610-612commentary
John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 290-293commentary
Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (SCM, 1967), pp. 92-96monograph
C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, vol. 1 (T&T Clark), on Rom 4:4-5commentary
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (Doubleday, 1993), pp. 372-377commentary
Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (Yale, 2009)monograph