StrongerBible

taphos

τάφος

GreekG5028tomb, grave, ...

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 23:27Mat 23:29Mat 27:61Mat 27:64Mat 27:66Mat 28:1Rom 3:13
Root family
Names & words formed with this
Word studyTAH-fosnoun

What taphos means

a grave: the place where a dead body is laid, named from the act of burying it

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

Greek had more than one word for a grave, and this one is built on the verb for burying (θάπτω), so it names the place by what happens there: a body is put in and left. It covers a chamber cut into rock and closed with a stone, and it covers a tomb built up above ground where a family or a town keeps the memory of its dead. Six of its seven uses in the New Testament are in Matthew.

Four of those six are the tomb of Jesus, and they come at the point in the story where the tomb stops being a resting place and becomes a guarded site. A watch is posted, the stone is sealed, two women sit facing it, and the same two come back at first light to look at it. Matthew had used the commoner Greek word for a tomb (μνημεῖον) one sentence earlier for the very same rock chamber, so the two words are close to interchangeable in his hands.

Matthew's other two uses turn the word against the people it describes. Building and keeping up a grave is an act of honor, so the leaders who raise buildings over the graves of the prophets are doing what a grateful people does. But in the same speech they are compared to graves that have been coated with lime: handsome from the road, and packed with bones and decay behind the plaster. Both halves of that charge depend on a grave being a thing you can see and tend from the outside while its contents stay hidden.

Paul's single use, quoting a psalm, keeps the picture and moves it onto a person. A man's throat is a grave standing open, so that what comes out of his mouth is what comes out of a grave.

Nuances

1aa burial place holding a body: a rock chamber that can be sealed, watched, and visited
TranslatabilityDirect
Mat 27:61Mat 27:64Mat 27:66Mat 28:1
1ba grave as a standing structure people build, decorate, and keep up for the dead
Mat 23:27Mat 23:29
1ca grave as a picture of a person's mouth, standing open with death coming out of it
TranslatabilityDirect
Rom 3:13

What scholars say about taphos

BDAG and LSJ derive τάφος from θάπτω and gloss it "grave, tomb"; the classical range runs from burial and the funeral rites to the sepulchre itself, and by the Hellenistic period the concrete sense dominates, so all seven New Testament occurrences are the concrete sense or a figurative extension of it. Louw and Nida place τάφος alongside μνῆμα and μνημεῖον in the single semantic domain of burial places, and Matthew's burial narrative shows the interchange directly: 27:60 has μνημεῖον for the rock-cut tomb Joseph owned, while 27:61, 27:64, 27:66 and 28:1 have τάφος for that same tomb. On 23:27 Davies and Allison connect the whitewashing to the practice of marking graves with lime so that passersby would avoid the corpse impurity of Numbers 19:16, which makes the woe a charge of concealed defilement rather than of mere concern for appearances; commentators differ over whether the coating functions primarily as warning or as decoration, but not over the meaning of τάφος. Romans 3:13 quotes Psalm 5:10 LXX (5:9 in English versions) verbatim, where τάφος ἀνεῳγμένος renders Hebrew קֶבֶר; Cranfield and Moo discuss whether Paul assembled the catena of Romans 3:10-18 himself or drew on an existing collection of testimonia, a question that does not bear on the sense of the noun.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. τάφοςlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. τάφοςlexicon
  • G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (1937), s.v. τάφοςlexicon
  • J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (1989), domain 7, Constructionslexicon
  • W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, ICC, vol. 3 (1997), on Matthew 23:27commentary
  • C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, vol. 1 (1975), on Romans 3:13commentary
  • D. J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (1996), on Romans 3:10-18commentary

All attested forms of τάφος

accusative m s

τάφον

Mat 27:64, Mat 27:66, Mat 28:1

accusative m p

τάφους

Mat 23:29

dative m p

τάφοις

Mat 23:27

genitive m s

τάφου

Mat 27:61

nominative m s

τάφος

Rom 3:13