a song of praise, above all one sung to God
A hymn is a sung song of praise. In the wider Greek world it was, first and foremost, praise addressed to a god, the very thing you sang in worship of a deity. The word appears in the New Testament only twice, and both times it stands shoulder to shoulder with two other words for sacred singing, psalms and songs, in Paul's call for believers to teach and encourage one another with music (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16).
Because the word sits in that list of three, the key question is whether Paul meant three separate kinds of music or simply stacked up near-synonyms for the whole range of Christian praise. The Greek Old Testament points strongly toward the second answer: there the words for psalm, hymn, and song are used interchangeably, even piled together in the headings of the Psalms. Paul's first readers would most likely have heard the three terms as overlapping vocabulary for sung worship, not as three fenced-off categories.
Even so, this particular word kept a certain flavor of its own. It was the word Greeks reached for when they wanted to name a song offered to a god. So when the early believers used it of what they sang to Jesus, they were quietly making a large claim. An outside witness confirms the practice: around the year 112 a Roman governor named Pliny reported that Christians gathered before dawn and sang a song to Christ as to a god. That is the charge this humble word carries.
Disputed
Whether the three song-terms in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 (psalm, hymn, spiritual song) name distinct musical genres or are overlapping near-synonyms for Christian sung praise.
- majorityNear-synonyms: the three most common Septuagint words for religious song, used interchangeably in the psalm superscriptions and here simply piled up for the whole range of sung worship, not to be pressed into separate genres.; Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Word, 1990), 346; Frank Thielman, Ephesians, BECNT (Baker, 2010), 361; Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, PNTC (Eerdmans, 2008), 289; James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1996), 238-39
- minoritySoft but real distinctions: the word for hymn leans toward the older Greek register of poetic praise addressed to a deity, which Paul deliberately takes up and turns toward Christ for his mixed churches.; Clinton E. Arnold, Ephesians, ZECNT (Zondervan, 2010), 353; Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker, 2002), 708-10
- minorityAll three terms refer to the Old Testament Psalms, since the collocation of all three occurs together in the Greek psalm titles, so no distinct meaning need be sought among them.; G. K. Beale, Colossians and Philemon, BECNT (Baker, 2019), 306