Ointment
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μύρον (myron) names perfumed oil or ointment, often costly and used in hospitality, personal care, honor, or burial preparation. In Luke 7 a woman brings perfume into a Pharisee's house and anoints Jesus' feet as an expression of love flowing from forgiveness.
Reader summary
Full entry for μύρον (G3464) · Open the biblical lexicon
μύρον (myron) names perfumed oil or ointment, often costly and used in hospitality, personal care, honor, or burial preparation. In Luke 7 a woman brings perfume into a Pharisee's house and anoints Jesus' feet as an expression of love flowing from forgiveness.
The BSB source-word alignment has 14 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include perfume (8), with perfume (2), [It] (1), myrrh (1), of perfume (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 26:7. Its strongest book concentrations include John (4), Luke (4), Mark (3), Matthew (2).
μύρον (myron) names perfumed oil or ointment, often costly and used in hospitality, personal care, honor, or burial preparation. In Luke 7 a woman brings perfume into a Pharisee's house and anoints Jesus' feet as an expression of love flowing from forgiveness. John identifies Mary through a similar embodied act and emphasizes the quantity, pure nard, expense, fragrance, and controversy surrounding it.
Judas translates the perfume into a price and invokes the poor, but John exposes his theft and Jesus interprets Mary's act in relation to His burial. The noun has no automatic theology of extravagance. Material cost can express fitting honor, yet cost alone does not make an act faithful. The passage judges both the giver and the objection by their relation to Jesus, truth, love, and the approaching cross.
μύρον is perfumed oil whose narrative force comes from embodied honor, hospitality, forgiveness, cost, and burial preparation. Jesus' interpretation governs the act more than aroma or price.
When a sinful woman from that town learned that Jesus was dining there, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume.
The perfume belongs to an embodied response of love and welcome from a forgiven woman in contrast with the host's neglected hospitality.
Then Mary took about a pint of expensive perfume, made of pure nard, and she anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
John makes the gift material and public: its cost and fragrance fill the scene while Mary's action honors Jesus before His death.
“Why wasn’t this perfume sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
Judas's calculation sounds compassionate, but the narrator exposes corrupt motive and Jesus supplies the burial horizon that Judas refuses to see.
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. Fragrant aromatic ointment used for anointing bodies, distinct from ordinary oil (ἔλαιον)
Fragrant aromatic ointment used for anointing bodies, distinct from ordinary oil (ἔλαιον)
ointment: Mat.26:7, 12, Mrk.14:3-5, Luk.7:37-38, 46 23:56, Jhn.11:2 12:3, 5, Rev.18:13.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
14 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
anointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
Read verseanointing-oil, ointment
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 5 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.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 1 selected witness from 14 lexical occurrence verses.
μύρον is built from this root:
Symbol of devotion and burial preparation.
Hebrew roots and equivalents that share conceptual or etymological ground with this Greek word.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
μύρον makes devotion visible and therefore contestable. Luke 7 places perfume in a scene of forgiven love, failed hospitality, and Jesus' authority to forgive sins. John 12 identifies the perfume as costly pure nard, records Mary wiping Jesus' feet with her hair, and lets its fragrance fill the house. Judas responds with a plausible financial objection, but John discloses that his stated concern for the poor is false.
Jesus then gives Mary's act its decisive horizon by connecting the perfume with His burial. The passage does not teach that practical mercy is unimportant or that expensive gifts are inherently superior. It teaches that Christ's worth, approaching death, and knowledge of the heart expose both true honor and religiously useful pretense. Teachers should preserve the act's material generosity while allowing Jesus, not aesthetic sentiment or fundraising rhetoric, to interpret it.
John.12.1-8
The noun identifies perfume or perfumed ointment. Its price, substance, and use must be learned from modifiers and narrative setting. It is related to the act of applying perfume but should not be confused with every oil term or with vocabulary for royal and priestly consecration.
Perfume and costly ointment appear in Scripture in care, hospitality, royal life, worship settings, and burial customs. John's theological emphasis comes from Jesus' own burial interpretation, not from treating every fragrant-oil text as a prophecy of Mary or the passion. Concern for the poor remains a genuine covenant duty even when Judas exploits it.
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