What Does Luke 23:53 Mean?
And he lowered it, and rolled it in linen, and placed it in a tomb cut from stone, where no one had ever been placed.
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 took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.THE KEY
The “sepulchre” is a μνῆμα (mnēma, memorial), a place of remembrance that has never held a body before.
THE MEANING
You meet the tenderness of bodily care beside the starkness of death: he is wrapped in linen and placed in a tomb hewn from stone. The tomb has never held anyone, so this burial enters an entirely unused resting place. The verse lets the scene stop there, with the body in a space without an earlier occupant.
THE ROOT
μνῆματι
mnēmati
GROWS FROM
μνη-
mnē-
Memory, remembrance; μνῆμα means a memorial or tomb.
The KJV’s “sepulchre” obscures the Greek word’s place in the memory-family. This memorial-place is unused: the one laid there is the first body it holds.
ALSO GROWS
mnēmē: Memory, remembrance
μνήμη
It shares the tomb’s memory-family, making “place of remembrance” part of the word’s texture.
mimnēskō: Remember, call to mind
μιμνῄσκω
This family also names the act of remembering, which becomes striking when the women are later told to remember at the tomb.
ἔθηκεν
ethēken
GROWS FROM
θη-/θε- (thē-/the-, set or place)
To put, set, or place something deliberately.
“placed” in this verse is ethēken. English repeats “laid” for both the act of placing the body and the statement that no one had lain there before. Greek distinguishes the deliberate placing from the state of lying there, holding care and the tomb’s unusedness as separate details.
ALSO GROWS
thesis: A placing, position; also a proposition set forth
θέσις
Its sense of setting something in place echoes the deliberate act described here.
thēkē: A case or receptacle
θήκη
It belongs to the same putting or placing family and echoes the tomb as a place that receives what is placed within it.
THE PATTERN
In Scripture, a tomb can mark a threshold where death’s apparent finality gives way to life.
And it came to be, as they were burying a man, behold, they saw a raiding band of men, and they cast the man into the cave of Elisha. And when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he came to life, and stood up on his feet.Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been laid.He is not here, but has been raised. Remember how he spoke to you while he was still in Galilee.THE THREAD
He is not here, but has been raised. Remember how he spoke to you while he was still in Galilee.The Greek word for “sepulchre” in Luke 23:53 belongs to the same memory-family as the word for “remember” here. The tomb first receives the body; then remembering the living words makes its vacancy intelligible.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us