gold: the precious metal named plainly, whether as raw material, as money, or as the temple's treasure
This is the ordinary Greek word for gold, and it does the same plain naming work the metal's name does in English. It turns up only ten times in the New Testament, and in nearly every one of them it sits in a list beside other valuable materials: gold, silver (ἄργυρος) and copper in a traveler's money belt; gold, silver and precious stones on a builder's foundation; gold, silver and stone in the making of an idol; and gold at the head of a long manifest of luxury cargo unloaded at a doomed city's docks.
Because gold sat at the top of the scale of value, the word slides easily from the metal itself to what the metal stands for:
- the raw substance, offered as a gift, built with, shipped as freight, or worked into images
- money, in the stock pairing of gold and silver for the cash a person carries or hoards away
- the temple's treasure, sacred gold that some argued was weighty enough to make an oath binding
Greek had a second noun for the metal, χρυσίον, which leans toward gold already refined, worn as jewelry, or struck into coin, and a describing word, χρύσεος, for an object formed of it. The two nouns overlap heavily and many sentences would take either one, so the difference is a leaning rather than a rule.
One thing the word never does is confer holiness. The same gold is a gift laid before the child at Bethlehem and freight in the hold of a merchant ship whose city is about to fall. Gold measures worth; what that worth serves depends entirely on whose hands hold it.