A pound in weight
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λίτρα names a pound or measured weight. John uses it in scenes of costly devotion and burial preparation: Mary's measured amount of expensive perfume in John 12:3, and Nicodemus bringing a large mixture of myrrh and aloes in John 19:39.
Reader summary
Full entry for λίτρα (G3046) · Open the biblical lexicon
λίτρα names a pound or measured weight. John uses it in scenes of costly devotion and burial preparation: Mary's measured amount of expensive perfume in John 12:3, and Nicodemus bringing a large mixture of myrrh and aloes in John 19:39.
The BSB source-word alignment has 2 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include . . . (1), about a pint (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at John 12:3. Its strongest book concentrations include John (2).
λίτρα names a pound or measured weight. John uses it in scenes of costly devotion and burial preparation: Mary's measured amount of expensive perfume in John 12:3, and Nicodemus bringing a large mixture of myrrh and aloes in John 19:39. The word makes the devotion and burial care tangible.
The pastoral value is measured concreteness. The word does not by itself prove Mary's motive or Nicodemus's full spiritual state. John supplies those through the scene. But the measured weight helps readers feel that love, honor, and burial preparation are not vague. They involve costly, material actions toward Jesus. The word helps teachers keep devotion embodied without turning quantity into the whole message.
John 12:3 uses λίτρα for the measured amount of costly perfume Mary brings to Jesus.
λίτρα gives weight to John's scenes, literally and narratively. Mary's perfume is not an abstract gesture. Nicodemus's burial spices are not a token detail. John gives measured quantities that make the acts embodied, costly, and public. A careful companion should not make the number itself the meaning, but it should let the measured language help readers see that love and honor toward Jesus take material form.
In John, λίτρα helps make devotion and burial preparation materially visible, while the surrounding scenes define their meaning.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Greek word. a pound in weight
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
2 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
a Roman pound
Read versea Roman pound
Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
This word appears as a noun across 2 case and number patterns. The form changes show how the word functions in a sentence; they do not change the basic lexical meaning by themselves.
Verse guides are not available for this word yet, so verse references remain plain evidence markers.
This word opens the tangible cost of devotion and burial care in John: Mary brings measured perfume, and Nicodemus brings measured spices for Jesus' burial.
It corrects readings that make devotion purely sentimental or make quantity itself the whole point.
Frame λίτρα through John 12:3 and John 19:39. Let the measured weight support embodied devotion and burial honor.
MorphGNT Strong's Dictionary XML — CC0 1.0 Public Domain
Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (morphhb/OSHB) — CC BY 4.0
Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon — CC BY 4.0
Berean Standard Bible (BSB) source-word alignment - CC0 Public Domain