a birth pang: the gripping pain of labor, used in the New Testament as a picture of anguish that seizes suddenly and cannot be escaped
From Homer onward this was an ordinary word for what a woman goes through in labor: not a general ache but the pain itself, arriving in waves. Greek writers stretched it early. Plato has Socrates tell a young student that his soul is in labor with an idea, and the tragedians used it for any anguish that doubles a person over. The New Testament never uses it of an actual birth. All four times it is a picture, and the picture works because everyone knows what labor is like:
- it comes on suddenly and cannot be talked out of
- it arrives in waves rather than as one steady ache
- once it has started, the process is under way and will finish
Each New Testament writer leans on a different part of that. Paul presses the suddenness in 1 Thessalonians 5:3: the pang lands on a pregnant woman without warning, and there is no dodging it. Jesus presses the sequence in Matthew 24:8 and Mark 13:8: wars, earthquakes, and famines are only the beginning of the pains, so the disciples are told to read them as a start, not a finish.
The word carries an Old Testament history too. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used it constantly for the terror the prophets described, where kings and nations writhe like a woman giving birth. In one famous place that translation also blurred two Hebrew words that look alike: the psalm that pictures death as a hunter with ropes around its victim (חֶבֶל) came out in Greek as the birth pangs of death. Peter quotes that psalm tradition in Acts 2:24, which is why translators there are split between ropes and labor pains.
One more thing sets this word apart from ordinary words for suffering such as pressure (θλῖψις) or grief (λύπη). Labor pain is not pointless pain: it ends in a birth. How far each New Testament writer is leaning on that hope, and how far he simply wants the terror, is one of the liveliest arguments about the word.
Nuances
Whether λύσας τὰς ὠδῖνας τοῦ θανάτου in Acts 2:24 means that God untied the cords with which death bound Jesus, or that death's labor pains ended in the birth of the risen Christ.
- majorityLuke writes ὠδῖνες because he is echoing LXX Psalm 17:5-6 (2 Samuel 22:6), and the phrase functions broadly as the pangs or agony of death: the Hebrew ambiguity is inherited rather than exploited, and the difference in sense is immaterial to Peter's argument.; C.K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles (ICC); Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (Anchor Bible); Richard I. Pervo, Acts (Hermeneia)
- minorityThe phrase means the bonds or cords of death, following the Hebrew חֶבְלֵי מָוֶת of Psalm 18:5 (parallel to the snares of death) which the Septuagint rendered as though from חֵבֶל, pang; λύω then has its ordinary sense of untying.; LSJ, s.v. ὠδίς II.3; Robert G. Bratcher, "Having Loosed the Pangs of Death," The Bible Translator 10.1 (1959) 18-20; Benjamin R. Wilson, "Taking up and Raising, Fixing and Loosing: A Chiastic Wordplay in Acts 2.23b-24," New Testament Studies (2013)
- minorityLuke intends the full Greek force of the noun: death is pictured as a woman in labor whose pangs are brought to an end by the birth of the Messiah, the resurrection being a new birth from the womb of the grave (cf. LXX Job 39:2, where λύω plus ὠδῖνες means to bring labor to term).; C.J. Ellicott, ed., A New Testament Commentary for English Readers, on Acts 2:24
Disputed
How much of the Jewish tradition of the messianic woes (חֶבְלֵי מָשִׁיחַ) may legitimately be read into ἀρχὴ ὠδίνων at Matthew 24:8 and Mark 13:8.
- majorityDistinguish imagery from terminology: the birth-pang motif for pre-redemption tribulation is securely pre-70 (the prophets, 1QH 11, 1 Enoch 62:4-6, 4 Ezra 16:37-39), but the fixed rabbinic phrase is Amoraic (b. Sanhedrin 98b; b. Shabbat 118a), so the tradition stands behind the Synoptic saying without its later doctrinal shape. The Synoptic plural ὠδίνων, against the rabbinic singular, points to independent descent from the prophets.; Gerhard Bertram, "ὠδίν, ὠδίνω," TDNT 9:667-674; H.L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, Exkurs 29; Conrad Gempf, "The Imagery of Birth Pangs in the New Testament," Tyndale Bulletin 45.1 (1994) 119-135
- contestedAn expectation of eschatological tribulation preceding Israel's restoration was already available to Jesus and Paul, so the messianic-woes pattern may be invoked as first-century currency.; Dale C. Allison Jr., The End of the Ages Has Come (Fortress, 1985); Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile (Mohr Siebeck, 2005)
- minorityThe technical notion of messianic woes emerged only in the mid to late second century CE, so it is anachronistic as background for the Gospels.; J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Fortress, 1980), 146