to shatter: to break something by crushing it, leaving it smashed, mangled, or ruined
This verb describes force that leaves something in pieces. It is what a violent man does to the iron shackles holding him (Mark 5:4), what a woman does to a sealed perfume jar so she can pour it out (Mark 14:3), and what an iron rod does to cheap clay pots (Revelation 2:27). The result is wreckage rather than a clean parting, which is why the matching noun built from the same root (σύντριμμα) names the ruin that is left behind rather than the blow that caused it.
Because the picture is crushing rather than cutting, the word moves easily from objects to people:
- a reed already bent and mangled, still standing but past all use (Matthew 12:20)
- a boy thrown down and battered by a spirit that will not release him (Luke 9:39)
- people crushed in heart, whose inner life has caved in (Luke 4:18)
- an enemy stamped flat under the feet of God's people (Romans 16:20)
Greek-speaking Jews used this verb constantly in their Bible to render the main Hebrew word for breaking and shattering (שָׁבַר), so the New Testament writers inherit both the word and the passages it filled. Matthew 12:20 draws on Isaiah, where the crushed reed is spared; Luke 4:18 draws on Isaiah again, where the crushed in heart are healed; and John 19:36 draws on the rule that no bone of the Passover lamb was to be broken, applied to Jesus on the cross.
Greek had several ways to say "break," and the differences are worth hearing. Snapping something rigid in two is κατάγνυμι, which stands right beside this verb in Matthew 12:20: the reed is already crushed, and Jesus refuses to finish it off by snapping it. Tearing something open along a seam is ῥήγνυμι. Pulling a loaf apart by hand at the table is κλάω. This is the brutal one of the set.
Nuances
Whether the clause "to heal the brokenhearted" in Luke 4:18, which carries this occurrence of the verb, is original to Luke or a later scribal assimilation to the Septuagint text of Isaiah 61:1.
- majorityThe clause is a secondary addition harmonizing Luke's citation to the fuller Septuagint text of Isaiah 61:1, and is absent from the earliest and best witnesses.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., at Luke 4:18; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (Anchor Bible)
- minorityThe clause belongs to the text of Luke, being supported by the great mass of later Greek manuscripts.; Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform