a large sword: the long, heavy blade, and in the New Testament the sword of God's judgment or a wound that runs a person through
The word began as the name of a foreign weapon. Greeks knew it as a Thracian blade, long and single-edged, big enough that some ancient writers grouped it with the spear rather than with the sword. Greek-speaking readers of the Old Testament met it constantly, because it is one of the two words the ancient translators reached for when they came to the Hebrew word for sword (חֶרֶב), and it turns up especially where the blade belongs to God or to an angel.
In the New Testament it never once appears in an ordinary fight. All seven uses sit inside prophecy or vision, six of them in Revelation and the seventh in Simeon's warning to Mary. Across those seven:
- no soldier is armed with it and nobody is described drawing it
- it is always something seen in a vision or foretold in an oracle, never a weapon in a narrated scuffle
- five of the six uses in Revelation give the blade to the risen Christ, four of them putting it in his mouth
The everyday weapon of the Gospels and Acts, the sword Peter swings in the garden and the one the jailer turns on himself, is a different Greek word (μάχαιρα).
The sword in the mouth is the heart of the picture. A blade held between the teeth is not a weapon a hand swings; it is speech that kills. When Christ says he will come and fight a church with the sword of his mouth, or when the nations are struck down by the blade that comes out of it, the point is that his sentence needs no army behind it. For him, saying it is doing it.
The one use outside Revelation runs the opposite direction. Instead of a sword coming out of a mouth, a sword goes into a person: Simeon tells Mary that her own soul will be run through. Whether that names a mother's grief or her share in the division her son will provoke is one of the oldest arguments in Luke's Gospel.
Nuances
What the sword passing through Mary's own soul in Luke 2:35 refers to.
- majorityMary's personal anguish, the grief of watching her son rejected and put to death.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible; I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, New International Greek Testament Commentary
- minorityThe discriminating sword of God's word, drawn from the judging sword of Ezekiel in its Greek form; Mary must pass through the same sifting of Israel that Simeon has just announced.; Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, rev. ed.
- minorityMary's own doubt about her son, a reading current among early Christian interpreters.; Origen, Homilies on Luke 17
Disputed
Whether this word names a distinct type of weapon or is largely interchangeable with the other Greek word for sword in biblical usage.
- contestedIt names a specific weapon, a long broad blade of Thracian origin, distinct from the shorter sword the other word denotes, so the choice of word is meaningful.; BDAG, s.v. ῥομφαία; LSJ, s.v. ῥομφαία
- contestedIn the Greek Old Testament the two words overlap heavily and their distribution varies book by book, so the choice reflects translators' habits more than any consistent distinction in weapon type.; W. Michaelis, "ῥομφαία," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 6