Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Matthew 6:11
Daily bread. The word translated daily occurs twice in all of Greek literature, here and in Luke's version of the prayer.
Matthew 6:11, in every translation this tool compares.
Someone hands you a sentence: The flimsock was open. There is no other sentence in English with flimsock in it. You can guess from the shape of the word, you can guess from the context, and that is all you will ever have. That is what a word appearing once looks like.
Because you have prayed this sentence more times than any other in the Bible and one of its five words cannot be defined. Nothing else in the Lord's Prayer is obscure. It is also the only adjective in the entire prayer, which is a strange place for the one unknown word to sit.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Every English version reads daily. Footnotes offer bread for tomorrow, or bread necessary for existence. The Latin tradition split, with Jerome rendering the same word supersubstantialem in Matthew and quotidianum in Luke.
ἐπιούσιος epiousios · G1967
Epiousios is a dis legomenon, a word occurring exactly twice: Matthew 6:11 and the Lukan parallel at 11:3. A single claimed occurrence outside the New Testament, on a papyrus, is regarded as highly doubtful. There is a strong argument against daily that most readers never meet: every other New Testament passage rendered daily contains the word hemera, day, and this one does not.
A word with no comparative evidence cannot be translated by comparison. Translators are reduced to breaking it into parts, epi plus a form of einai or of ienai, and the two paths give different answers.
A word occurring once is a hapax legomenon; twice is a dis legomenon. Either way there are no outside witnesses to check a meaning against. When your Bible's footnote offers two unrelated meanings for one word, that is usually what has happened.
BDAG lists four live possibilities: necessary for existence, for the current day, for the following day, and for the future. The first takes the word from einai, to be. The last two take it from ienai, to come, which would make it bread for tomorrow asked for today and turn the petition into a request for the provision of the age to come. Daily is the traditional rendering and most scholars now reject it, partly on the hemera argument above.
- Origen, On Prayer 27.7, already reports that the word was not in use among the Greeks and appears to have been coined
- The Vulgate reads supersubstantialem at Matthew 6:11 and quotidianum at Luke 11:3, the same word rendered two ways by one translator; the older Vetus Latina read quotidianum in both
- BDAG lists four possibilities: necessary for existence, for the current day, for the following day, for the future
- Every other New Testament passage rendered daily contains hemera, day; this one does not
- Foerster's analysis in Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 2:590-99
- The word is visible in P75, among the oldest surviving witnesses to these passages
- The single claimed occurrence outside the New Testament, on a papyrus, is widely regarded as doubtful
