sunteleia

BDAG and LSJ both give the base sense as completion or consummation; LSJ also documents the classical financial and administrative use for a joint contribution or a body of contributors, from which the notion of bringing many things together to a finish develops. In the New Testament the noun occurs only in the phrase συντέλεια (τοῦ) αἰῶνος (Mt 13:39, 40, 49; 24:3; 28:20) and, with the plural, ἐπὶ συντελείᾳ τῶν αἰώνων (Heb 9:26). The phrase is a Septuagintalism: συντέλεια regularly renders קֵץ and forms of כלה in Daniel and the prophets, which supplies Matthew's apocalyptic frame and its two-age scheme. Delling's TDNT treatment of the τέλος word group stresses that the compound denotes not mere cessation but the completing of a whole, and EDNT notes that Matthew's fixed phrase is formulaic rather than freshly coined at each occurrence. Davies and Allison (Matthew, ICC) discuss the phrase at 13:39 and 24:3, where whether the discourse's referent includes the fall of Jerusalem alongside the final close is contested among commentators; that debate concerns the referent of the discourse, not the lexical sense of the noun. On Heb 9:26 Attridge (Hebrews, Hermeneia) reads ἐπὶ συντελείᾳ τῶν αἰώνων as marking the eschatological climax already reached in Christ's self-offering, a realized emphasis characteristic of Hebrews.