the place a person belongs to because of their family: one's home, whether a hometown, a native country, or a homeland yet to come.
At its heart this word names the place you belong to because of your father and forefathers: home, in the sense of where your family is rooted. Its scale flexes with the setting, and that is the one thing to watch:
- a single town or village, like the Nazareth Jesus grew up in
- a whole native country or ancestral land
- the lasting home God has prepared beyond this world
In the Gospels it carries the small, everyday sense that ordinary first-century documents use: a person's hometown, the place where they were raised and are known. This is the setting of the famous saying that a prophet is not honored in his own hometown, spoken as Jesus is turned away by the people who watched him grow up.
The letter to the Hebrews stretches the same word much further. It says the great figures of faith were looking for a homeland, and makes clear they did not mean the country they had left, which they could have gone back to, but a better one: a home God himself has prepared for them beyond this life. Here the word points past any place on a map.
The closest word in the Hebrew Scriptures is מוֹלֶדֶת, the native place and kindred a person is born into, the home God told Abraham to leave behind.
Nuances
Which πατρίς the evangelist has in view at John 4:44, given that the explanatory "for" (γάρ) precedes the Galileans' welcome in v. 45.
- contestedJudea/Jerusalem, the homeland of Israel's prophets, which Jesus had just left after a hostile reception (chs. 2-3); this fits John 1:11 ("he came to his own, and his own did not receive him") and explains why he departs for Galilee.; J. W. Pryor, "John 4:44 and the Patris of Jesus," CBQ 49 (1987): 254-63; C. S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (2003), 1:628; F. J. Moloney, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (1998); A. T. Lincoln, The Gospel According to Saint John, BNTC (2005)
- contestedGalilee, with Nazareth in view, keeping the same reference the word has in the other Gospels; the tension with v. 45 dissolves because the Galilean welcome is only a superficial enthusiasm for signs, not genuine prophetic honor.; R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, AB 29 (1966), 186-87; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 2nd ed. (1978), 246-47; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, PNTC (1991), 235-36
- minorityHeaven itself: Jesus' true homeland in this Gospel is with the Father, and every earthly place is foreign to the one who "comes from above" (John 3:31; 8:23), so the saying is a theological statement rather than a geographical explanation.; R. H. Lightfoot, St. John's Gospel: A Commentary (1956), 35; A. Stimpfle, "Das 'sinnlose' gar in Joh 4,44," Biblische Notizen 65 (1992): 86-96
How the heavenly homeland of Hebrews 11:14 relates to the Hellenistic-Jewish idea, prominent in Philo, of heaven as the wise soul's true fatherland (De confusione linguarum 77-78; De agricultura 64-65).
- majorityHebrews shares the vocabulary (πατρίς, sojourner/stranger, colony imagery) with Philo but resemanticizes it eschatologically: not a timeless intelligible realm above, but a future "city" God has prepared and will give (11:10, 16; 13:14).; H. W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (1989), on 11:13-16; C. R. Koester, Hebrews, AB 36 (2001), on 11:13-16; L. T. Johnson, Hebrews: A Commentary, NTL (2006)
- minorityThe homeland is best read in purely apocalyptic-eschatological terms with little debt to Philo: the promised "rest," the unshakable kingdom, and the coming city stand in continuity with the Old Testament land promise fulfilled in the new creation.; W. L. Lane, Hebrews, WBC 47A-B (1991); P. T. O'Brien, The Letter to the Hebrews, PNTC (2010); G. L. Cockerill, The Epistle to the Hebrews, NICNT (2012)
- minorityOlder view (now largely abandoned): Hebrews depends directly on Philonic Platonism, so the homeland is the timeless heavenly reality the soul returns to.; H. Montefiore, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, BNTC (1964); R. Williamson, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews (1970), arguing against direct dependence