sphazō

The lexica agree on the sense. LSJ gives "slay, slaughter," properly by cutting the throat, used of sacrificial victims, of animals killed for food, and of persons violently killed; the Attic form is sphatto. BDAG distributes the New Testament occurrences over two senses: to slaughter or butcher, covering the sacrificial killing of the Lamb (Revelation 5:6, 5:9, 5:12, 13:8) together with the extended use for the beast's mortally wounded head (13:3), and to murder or put to death by violence (1 John 3:12; Revelation 6:4, 6:9, 18:24). Louw and Nida likewise separate the killing of a sacrificial victim from violent killing generally. In the Septuagint the verb is the regular equivalent of Hebrew shachat, the technical term for the ritual killing of an animal, which is the main reason a sacrificial coloring is available to John at all. Revelation scholarship has concentrated on the perfect participle applied to the Lamb, which presents the slaughter as an abiding state rather than a bare past event. Bauckham reads the slaughtered Lamb as the book's central christological image, in which conquest is redefined by sacrificial death; Beale and Koester ground the imagery in the Passover lamb and in the servant of Isaiah 53:7, led like a sheep to the slaughter; Aune argues that the lamb figure derives principally from Jewish apocalyptic traditions of a conquering lamb, so that the slaughter language marks a violent death without cultic freight. The application of the same participle to a head of the beast in 13:3 is widely read as a deliberate parody of the Lamb's wound. On 1 John 3:12, Brown observes that the choice of this violent verb over the ordinary word for killing reflects a stream of Jewish tradition that made Cain's act peculiarly savage and traced it to the evil one.