What Does Matthew 26:12 Mean?
For in that she has poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.
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
For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.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 healers, to spice his father, and the healers spiced Israel.And they buried him in his own graves, which he had hewn for himself in the city of David, and laid him down in the bed that was filled with sweet smells and spices of many kinds, prepared by the work of the mixers. And they burned for him a very great burning.Then they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen wrappings with the spices, as is the custom of the Jews to bury.THE THREAD
Then Jesus said, Let her go, so that she might guard this for the day of my burial.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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