People who know me know that I love languages, and that I enjoy studying the origins of words. So it’s not surprising that a favorite book of mine is William Barclay‘s “New Testament Words.” (Originally a series of magazine articles, it requires no knowledge of Greek.) While reading it the other day I came across a Greek word that has given me some good insights, so I would like to share it with you in this post.

The word is ptochos, which means “poor.” Jesus uses it in the beatitudes when he says “blessed are the poor in spirit,” and when he responds to the inquiry from John the Baptist's messengers, “the poor have the gospel preached to them.” In these passages ptochos is used.

But now things get interesting. Greek has two words for “poor.” There is the word penes, which simply describes the person for whom life and living is a struggle, the opposite of someone who lives in affluence.

Then there is this word ptochos. This word comes from the verb ptossein, which means to cower or crouch; and it describes not simply honest, poverty, and the struggle of a working man to make ends meet; it describes abject poverty, which has literally nothing, and which is in imminent danger of real starvation. So the word ptochos does not describe a genteel poverty, but real, acute destitution.

Barclay gives two Hebrew adjectives that lie behind our Greek word, which I will not go into here except to give the upshot: “these [Hebrew] words come to describe people who, because they have nothing on earth, have come to put their complete and total trust in God.”

Thus, when we read, “blessed are the poor in spirit,” we can now appreciate the seriousness of this beatitude. Here is how Barkley puts it:

“Blessed is the man who feels this sense of destitution, and who has then put his utter and complete trust in God. So then the beatitude means: blessed is the man who is conscious of a desperate need, and who is utterly certain that in God, and in God alone, that need can be supplied.“

It was this last line that really caught me: “in God alone.“ I’d much prefer something like “in God, almost entirely.“ I’d like some wiggle room, some space where I can exercise my free will and feel that I'm in charge, in control at least a little bit. But we all know how that works out!

So my prayer after reading this article on the Greek word for “poor” is, “Lord, please give me the strength to be truly ptochos, teach me how to trust in you alone.”