What Does Luke 21:2 Mean?
And he saw also a certain widow, emptied, casting in two thin coins.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites.THE KEY
The Greek calls the coins *lepta*, “thin or fine things,” so their slightness is built into the very word the verse uses for her gift.
THE MEANING
This verse holds a small offering and the giver’s poverty in the same view. It speaks now wherever a gift seems too slight to register: smallness does not make the act invisible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that only a substantial gift is worth seeing.
THE ROOT
λεπτά
lepta
GROWS FROM
λεπ-
lep-
Thin or fine; a slender, slight thing.
The coin word comes from λεπτός, meaning thin or fine. English “mites” conveys how little the coins are worth, while the Greek also carries their slightness in the name itself.
ALSO GROWS
leptos: Thin, fine, delicate.
λεπτός
This adjective shares the coin’s root and shows that “mite” carries a quality of slightness as well as a denomination.
lepis: A scale or thin flake.
λεπίς
This word shares the λεπ- root and gives the idea a physical image: something small and thin.
THE PATTERN
What is given is understood in relation to the giver’s means, not by amount alone.
For they all threw in out of their overflow, but she, out of her lack, threw in all that she had, even all her living.For if the leaning heart is there first, it is well received according to what one has, and not according to what one does not have.And she said, As the LORD your God lives, I have no loaf, but only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a flask, and look, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and make it for me and for my son, that we may eat it, and die.THE THREAD
I say to you, you will not come out from there until you give back even the last thin coin.“Mite” translates the same Greek coin word in both verses: λεπτόν (lepton), the singular form of the word behind the widow’s two coins. Here it names the smallest unit in an account; in Luke 21:2, two such units are visible in her hand.
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