StrongerBible

chasma

χάσμα

GreekG5490“chasm, gulf, ...”

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Luk 16:26
Akin to
Word studyResearch-gradeKHAHS-mahnoun

What chasma means

a gaping gulf: a wide, empty gap that holds one side apart from the other

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The word belongs to a family of Greek words for gaping and yawning open, and that is its picture: something has split apart and left a wide, empty space. Greek writers used it for all kinds of openings:

  • the vast pit that lies under the world
  • a crack torn in the ground by an earthquake
  • the gaping jaws of a beast or a whirlpool
  • a bright break in the dark of the night sky

What ties those uses together is not depth or danger but sheer openness. It is not the bottomless deep (ἄβυσσος), which is a place where things are shut up, and it is not a valley in the countryside (φάραγξ), which has a floor you can walk along. A gulf of this kind is the nothing in between.

In its one New Testament appearance, Jesus uses it for the space between a rich man in torment and Lazarus at Abraham's side. The word had a long history in Greek writing about the world of the dead, where a great gaping gulf marks off where the dead go, and Luke sets that familiar Greek picture inside a thoroughly Jewish scene of Abraham, Moses and the Prophets. The two men can see each other and speak to each other. What neither of them can do is move.

The weight of the sentence falls as much on the verb as on the noun: the gulf "has been fixed," put in place and left that way. That is what the image is for. Because nothing can be rearranged afterward, the story is free to turn to its real concern, that Moses and the Prophets are already enough to be listened to now. Some readers add that the gulf only makes vast what the rich man had already opened at his own gate, where Lazarus lay begging and was never carried across.

Luk 16:26
Luk 16:26

Whether the fixed chasm of Luke 16:26 describes an actual barrier within the postmortem world or functions as a narrative device within the parable, dramatizing a moral condition already settled in this life.

  • majorityIt belongs to the parable's imagery and is not a report on afterlife topography; its function is to render the reversal of fortunes irreversible so that the parable can pivot to the sufficiency of Moses and the Prophets in vv. 27 to 31.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV, Anchor Bible 28A (Doubleday, 1985), 1132-33; François Bovon, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51-19:27, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2013), 470-87; Outi Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery in Luke's Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, NovTSup 123 (Brill, 2007), 221-23; Richard Bauckham, "The Rich Man and Lazarus: The Parable and the Parallels," New Testament Studies 37 (1991): 225-46
  • minorityThe verse carries genuine doctrinal weight regarding the finality of postmortem judgment, even if its individual details are not to be pressed as cosmology.; Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker, 1996), 1372-73

Disputed

The cultural provenance of the phrase χάσμα μέγα in Luke 16:26: Greek underworld literature, or Jewish afterlife tradition mediated in Greek.

  • majorityThe wording is fundamentally Greek, at home in Hesiod's Tartarean chasm, Plato's chasms of judgment, Plutarch's visionary chasms and Lucian's Hades; no Jewish text applies this term to the barrier between righteous and wicked dead, so Luke has set a Greek geometry inside an otherwise Jewish tableau.; Outi Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery in Luke's Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, NovTSup 123 (Brill, 2007), 221-23; Jonathan Rivett Robinson, "A great chasm has been fixed: The topography of Luke 16:19-31 in Greco-Roman context," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 35 (2025): 24-42; Michael Wolter, The Gospel According to Luke, vol. 2 (Baylor University Press, 2017)
  • minorityThe controlling framework is Jewish, drawn from the compartmentalized underworld of 1 Enoch 22 and the opposed regions of 4 Ezra 7:36-38, with the Greek phrase at 1 Enoch 18:11-12 supplying Hellenistic Jewish mediation for the wording itself.; George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36, 81-108, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2001), 300-309; Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker, 1996), 1372-73

What scholars say about chasma

χάσμα is formed from the roots χαίνω / χάσκω, "to gape, yawn, be wide open," with χάος, χαῦνος and χήμη as its lexical siblings; the semantic core across the family is a gaping opening or cavity rather than disorder, which is why West and Most render Hesiod's Χάος as "Chasm" (Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, s.vv. χαίνω, χάος). LSJ divides the range into the yawning gulf of Tartarus and of earth fissures (Hesiod, Theogony 740, χάσμα μέγα; Herodotus 7.30), the gaping mouth of a beast or of Charybdis, and any wide opening or expanse (τὸ χάσμα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, Plato, Republic 614d); BDAG glosses "chasm, cleft, gap," and Louw-Nida §1.50 files it among geographical features, used figuratively in Luke of the impassable separation between two parts of the abode of the dead. Two silences are informative: TDNT has no article, and Moulton-Milligan no entry at all, the word being essentially absent from documentary papyri, which marks it as literary, philosophical and historiographical vocabulary rather than everyday usage. Hatch-Redpath records one unambiguous canonical Septuagint occurrence, 2 Kingdoms 18:17 (χάσμα μέγα rendering פַּחַת of the pit into which Absalom's corpse was thrown), so Luke's exact collocation is otherwise unattested in the Greek Bible; Bauckham and Lehtipuu judge the parallel coincidental, the Greek there being a stylistic amplification paired with βόθυνος μέγας rather than a fixed topographical term. The closest ancient analogues are the Platonic and Plutarchan chasms that serve as thresholds between the realms of the dead (Phaedo 111e-112b; Republic 614d; De sera numinis vindicta 566a), together with 1 Enoch 18:11-12, where the Greek phrase χάσμα μέγα confines fallen stars rather than separating human dead (Coblentz Bautch; Nickelsburg); Second Temple Judaism supplies the concept of separation in other vocabulary (1 Enoch 22; 4 Ezra 7:36-38; Testament of Abraham 11-14; Apocalypse of Zephaniah's impassable river) but not this term. On function the commentators are effectively unanimous: ἐστήρικται is read as a divine passive of permanence, and the chasm as a literary and theological device rendering the reversal irreversible so that the parable can pivot to the sufficiency of Moses and the Prophets (Fitzmyer; Bovon; Nolland; Marshall; Bauckham; Lehtipuu §11.4; Robinson 2025), with Plummer locating the chasm's basis in character formed during life and Henning reading it as vivid moral formation through description. The older derivation of the parable from the Demotic tale of Setne Khamwas (Gressmann, Jeremias) has been largely abandoned since Hock showed the Setne parallels contain no chasm and diverge structurally.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG, 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1081, s.v. χάσμαlexicon
  • LSJ, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Clarendon, 1940), s.v. χάσμαlexicon
  • Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (United Bible Societies, 1989), §1.50lexicon
  • Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, vol. 3 (Eerdmans, 1993), s.v. χάσμαtheological-dictionary
  • Robert S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill, 2010), 1614, 1616-17, s.vv. χαίνω, χάοςlexicon
  • M. L. West, Hesiod: Theogony, Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (Clarendon, 1966), 192commentary
  • Edwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath, A Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament, 3 vols. (Clarendon, 1897-1906), s.v. χάσμαreference
  • James Hope Moulton and George Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources (Hodder & Stoughton, 1930)lexicon
  • Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV, Anchor Bible 28A (Doubleday, 1985), 1124-36commentary
  • François Bovon, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51-19:27, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2013), 470-87commentary
  • I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 1978), 636-37commentary
  • John Nolland, Luke 9:21-18:34, Word Biblical Commentary 35B (Word, 1993), 828commentary
  • Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker, 1996), 1372-73commentary
  • Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991), 249-56commentary
  • Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to S. Luke, 5th ed., International Critical Commentary (T&T Clark, 1922), 394commentary
  • Michael Wolter, The Gospel According to Luke, vol. 2 (Baylor University Press, 2017)commentary
  • Outi Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery in Luke's Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, NovTSup 123 (Brill, 2007), esp. 221-23monograph
  • Richard Bauckham, "The Rich Man and Lazarus: The Parable and the Parallels," New Testament Studies 37 (1991): 225-46article
  • Jonathan Rivett Robinson, "A great chasm has been fixed: The topography of Luke 16:19-31 in Greco-Roman context," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 35 (2025): 24-42article
  • George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36, 81-108, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2001), 300-309commentary
  • Kelley Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17-19: No One Has Seen What I Have Seen, JSJSup 81 (Brill, 2003), 138-200monograph
  • Meghan Henning, Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell, WUNT 2/382 (Mohr Siebeck, 2014)monograph
  • Ronald F. Hock, "Lazarus and Micyllus: Greco-Roman Backgrounds to Luke 16:19-31," Journal of Biblical Literature 106 (1987): 447-63article
  • Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 2nd rev. ed. (SCM, 1972), 182-87monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of χάσμα

nominative n s

χάσμα

Luk 16:26