a load: whatever someone is carrying, named without any claim about how heavy it is
Long before it was ever a religious word, this was a working word from the docks and the market. Greek writers used it for a porter's bundle, a wagon of grain, a merchant's wares, a soldier's pack. Acts 27:10 keeps exactly that plain sense: the load is the grain in the hold of a freighter bound for Rome. Every other use in the New Testament is a picture built out from that one.
What the word does not say is the important part. It names the thing carried, not how much it weighs, so the adjective beside it can push it in either direction. In Matthew 23:4 the loads are heavy and hard to bear. In Matthew 11:30 the load is light. The noun is the same both times, and the adjectives do all the work. The other Greek word for a burden, βάρος, cannot flex that way, because it is built on the word for "heavy" and always leans toward something crushing.
Two of the pictures are about a load somebody else straps onto you. That is the charge against the religious teachers in Matthew 23:4 and Luke 11:46: they tie the bundles up, settle them on other people's shoulders, and then will not lift a finger to help carry them. Jesus answers that image with his own invitation, pairing the load with a yoke (ζυγός) and promising that what he asks of a follower will not break them.
Paul's use in Galatians 6:5 turns the picture inward. There the load is your own, and nobody else can shoulder it for you. Four verses earlier he had told the same readers to carry one another's weight, using the other word, so the two sentences are not cancelling each other out. They are about two different things: helping a neighbor who is buckling now, and answering for your own life yourself.
Nuances
Whether the φορτίον of Galatians 6:5 is the individual's account at the final judgment or a gnomic statement about the ordinary responsibilities of life, and how either reading relates to the βάρη of Galatians 6:2.
- majorityEschatological: the future βαστάσει looks to the Day of Christ, confirmed by the sowing and reaping of 6:7 to 10 and by Paul's individual-accountability language in Romans 14:10 to 12 and 2 Corinthians 5:10. The tension with 6:2 dissolves because v. 2 concerns present mutual care within the community and v. 5 concerns each person's reckoning before God. Kuck shows the motif is Jewish apocalyptic (4 Ezra 7.104 to 105; 2 Baruch 54.14 to 16; Psalms of Solomon 9.5).; David W. Kuck, "Each Will Bear His Own Burden: Paul's Creative Use of an Apocalyptic Motif," NTS 40.2 (1994): 289-97; Douglas J. Moo, Galatians (BECNT; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 379-81; Thomas R. Schreiner, Galatians (ZECNT; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 361-63; F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 260-63; J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (AB 33A; New York: Doubleday, 1997), on 6:1-5
- minorityNon-eschatological: βαστάσει is gnomic, and v. 5 grounds the self-examination of v. 4, so comparison with others is pointless because everyone has responsibilities of his own. Betz situates the whole passage among Hellenistic moral commonplaces on friendship and self-knowledge, and Burton denies both an eschatological reference and any real semantic difference between βάρος and φορτίον.; Ernest De Witt Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1921), 329-34; Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 299-304; J. B. Lightfoot, St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (London: Macmillan, 1890), 217; James D. G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians (BNTC; London: A&C Black, 1993), on 6:1-5