a corpse: the body of someone struck down, spoken of as a fallen thing rather than as a person
This word is built straight from the everyday Greek verb for falling, and it keeps that picture: it names the thing that has fallen and stayed down. Older Greek could stretch it to a collapse or a piece of bad luck, but by the first century it had narrowed to one grim use, the body of a person or an animal lying dead on the ground.
Every use in the New Testament follows a violent death: John the Baptist after his beheading, Jesus after the cross, the two witnesses of Revelation after they are struck down. It is not the ordinary word for a body (σῶμα), which names a living body as easily as a dead one, and it is not the word for a dead person (νεκρός). It names what is left behind. The Greek Old Testament had already used it this way, most often to render the Hebrew word for the corpses of the slain (פֶּגֶר).
The uses divide neatly into two situations:
- someone claims the body and carries it off to a grave
- the body is left lying where it fell, in a street or an open field
The second situation is the sharper one. Refusing a person burial was a deliberate insult piled on top of killing them, which is why Revelation lingers over the crowds who stare at the bodies and will not let them be put in a tomb. It even shifts between singular and plural for the two witnesses, speaking first of their body as one thing lying in the street and then of their bodies as two that no one is permitted to bury.