taxis

This is the everyday sense of the word, drawn from a verb that means to arrange, appoint, or put in place. It names the opposite of chaos: a gathering or a shared life where each part has its proper place and things happen in a fitting sequence.

Paul uses it this way twice. When he tells the Corinthians to let everything be done decently and in order, he is calling for turns to be taken and voices not to overlap, the very opposite of the confusion he had been correcting. When he praises the settled orderliness of the Colossian believers, he commends a community whose common life and faith hold together in a stable, disciplined way.

Whether the second of these carries a faint picture of soldiers holding their line is debated, but even there the plain sense is a group that is well ordered rather than falling apart.

In everyday Greek of the period the word could name a slot in a schedule or roster: an assigned turn to do a job that came round on a fixed cycle. This is how Luke uses it of the priest Zechariah, who served when his division's week of temple duty came up.

The priesthood was split into twenty-four groups that each took a turn on a set rotation. The word here does not name the group itself but the appointed turn when that group was on duty. English versions reach for several words to catch this (order, course, turn, assignment), because no single common word carries the idea of a scheduled turn in a rota.

The word can also point not to arrangement but to what sort of thing something is: its kind, character, or manner. Greek writers used it this way to say that a report had the character of gossip rather than history, or that a letter had the character of a plea. This is the sense that carries the weight of the argument in Hebrews.

Hebrews repeatedly calls Christ a priest after the order of Melchizedek, quoting a line from the Psalms. The phrase does not mean Christ inherited a priestly office passed down through Melchizedek's family, for that family line is never mentioned. It means Christ is a priest of the same kind as Melchizedek: appointed directly by God, marked by unending life, and standing apart from the priests descended from Levi.

The writer makes his own meaning plain a few verses on, where he restates the idea using the word "likeness" instead: Christ arises in the likeness of Melchizedek. That swap is the strongest clue that the phrase is about a type or character of priesthood, not a genealogy or a rung on a ladder of office. What exactly the word should carry here is still debated among scholars, and the main positions are recorded below.