What Does Matthew 26:12 Mean in the King James?
For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
What looks like perfume wasted on a living body is, in Jesus’ reading, care already meeting his coming burial.
THE MEANING
The ointment on Jesus’ body is already part of his burial preparation. A body’s coming end does not make its present care wasteful; the act holds tenderness and mortality together.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that care is wasted if it cannot prevent death: the ointment cannot spare Jesus burial, yet its meaning is not lost.
THE ROOT
ἐνταφιάσαι
entaphiasai
GROWS FROM
θάπτω
thaptō
to bury
The Greek verb means to prepare a body for burial, bringing the care of the grave into the act of pouring ointment. Jesus names her gesture as preparation for death, not as a wasteful display.
ALSO GROWS
thaptō: to bury
θάπτω
The root names the burial that her care anticipates.
taphos: tomb, grave
τάφος
The tomb is already present in the meaning of preparing the body for burial.
entaphiasmos: burial preparation
ἐνταφιασμός
This related noun appears in John’s account of Jesus naming the same act as preparation for his burial.
THE PATTERN
Care for the body continues through death in acts of preparation, fragrance, and burial.
And Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father: and the physicians embalmed Israel.And they buried him in his own sepulchres, which he had made for himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art: and they made a very great burning for him.Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.THE THREAD
Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.John uses the related Greek word ἐνταφιασμός (entaphiasmos), burial preparation, for the same act. Together, the verses reveal that Jesus understands the pouring as care for his body at the threshold of death.
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