The Greek word behind daily appears in two verses of the New Testament. No one knows for certain what it means.

It may meanHow it has been printed
for today“daily”, in the Berean Standard Bible and the King James Version
for tomorrow“for the coming day”, in the margin of the Revised Version
needed to live“needful”, in the margin of the American Standard Version
above all substance“supersubstantial”, in the Douay-Rheims Bible at Matthew 6:11

Matthew 6:9–13 Berean Standard Bible

Tap any word to see the Greek behind it.

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“Daily” is a best guess at a word found almost nowhere else

Most words in this prayer can be checked against many other uses, in the Bible and outside it. cannot. In the New Testament it stands only here and in Luke’s copy of the same prayer. The Didache, a Christian handbook from about the year 100, has it too, again in the Lord’s Prayer.

Origen, a Greek-speaking Bible scholar of the third century

“The word epiousion is not found in any Greek writer whether in philosophy or in common usage, but seems to have been formed by the evangelists.”

On Prayer 27, William A. Curtis’s translation

A translator usually learns what a rare word means by seeing how other people used it. Here there is almost no one to compare, so every reading rests on how the word seems to be built and what the sentence seems to need. Abbott-Smith’s lexicon of 1922 sets out the choices and quotes a 1907 commentary that suspected a misunderstood Aramaic phrase or a slip in the Greek.

For today

The English “daily” comes through the Latin quotidianus, which the oldest Latin Bibles used in both Gospels. On this reading the word leans on “this day” in the same line, and asks for one day’s bread at a time.

John Chrysostom, about 390

“He adds, ‘this day,’ that we should not trouble ourselves with thought for the coming day.”

Quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Matthew 6:11

For tomorrow

Greek had a common way of saying “the next day”: , used five times in Acts. Epiousios looks as if it could be built from it. Jerome found a Hebrew Gospel with mahar, “tomorrow”, at this point.

Jerome, about 398

“Give us today tomorrow’s bread; i.e. for the time to come.”

Commentary on Matthew, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Matthew 6:11

The strongest point against it comes later in the same sermon: Jesus tells his hearers not to worry about tomorrow.

What we need to live

Built instead from epi and ousia, “being”, the word would mean bread for keeping alive. Abbott-Smith gives this as “for subsistence, needful”, and the American Standard Version of 1901 printed “needful” in its margin. Proverbs asks for the same measure.

Bread above all substance

Taken part by part, epi-ousios can also read as “above being”. Jerome’s Latin Bible has supersubstantialem in Matthew and quotidianum in Luke, two Latin words for one Greek word. The Douay-Rheims Bible follows him, with this note at Matthew 6:11.

“It is understood of the bread of life, which we receive in the Blessed Sacrament.”

Douay-Rheims Bible, note on Matthew 6:11

What the churches do with it

The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not choose. Paragraph 2837 holds three readings together: a repeat of “this day”, what is necessary for life, and the Bread of Life in the Eucharist. Martin Luther’s catechism takes it as everything the body needs.

“Everything that belongs to the support and wants of the body.”

Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529), the Fourth Petition

The rest of the line is not in doubt. Every reading keeps , keeps , and keeps .

Two other lines Bibles word differently

Debts, or trespasses?

Matthew’s word is , “that which is owed, a debt”, here used “of sin as a debt”. Luke’s prayer says “sins” in this line. “Trespasses”, the word many churches say, stands in the verse just after the prayer, and it translates a different Greek word.

Evil, or the evil one?

The Greek has the same form whether it means “evil” or “the evil one”, so the grammar cannot decide. The King James Version takes the first and the Berean Standard Bible the second. Abbott-Smith lists this verse under Satan, “the evil one”, and points to a commentator who reads it the other way.

The King James ending, “For thine is the kingdom”, is not in the SBL Greek text or the Berean Standard Bible. The article explains where it came from.

How this page was made

This is Matthew 6:9–13 in the Berean Standard Bible, with each English word matched to the Greek word it translates. Tap a word to see the Greek, what it means, how the Berean Standard Bible translates it elsewhere, and every New Testament verse that uses it.

The counts come from the SBL Greek New Testament. Words as common as “and”, “us” and “come” appear in too many verses to list in full, so the list stops at the first 250 verses and says so. The verses of Matthew 6 always come first.

The meanings are G. Abbott-Smith’s, from his Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922). Tyndale House in Cambridge edited the lexicon for STEPBible, and its scholars wrote the one-word meanings. We shortened the entries, but the words in quotation marks are Abbott-Smith’s own. STEPBible also offers summaries written by AI, and we did not use them.

The Berean Standard Bible publishes its own table matching each English word to the Greek, and this page follows it. Where a Greek word has no English word of its own, the verse is listed with nothing marked.

Sources and licences

  • The Greek words and their grammar come from the MACULA Greek Linguistic Datasets, SBLGNT edition, © 2022–2024 Biblica, Inc. (Clear Bible), CC BY 4.0. github.com/Clear-Bible/macula-greek
  • The Greek text is the SBL Greek New Testament, © 2010 Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, CC BY 4.0. github.com/LogosBible/SBLGNT
  • The English text and its word tables are the Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible, dedicated to the public domain. bereanbible.com. Other English wording comes from the King James Version and the Douay-Rheims Bible.
  • The meanings come from STEPBible-Data’s Translators Brief lexicon of Extended Strongs for Greek (TBESG), by Tyndale House Cambridge and STEPBible.org, CC BY 4.0, based on G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922). stepbible.github.io/STEPBible-Data
  • The Greek letters are set in GFS Didot by the Greek Font Society, SIL Open Font License.
  • The section on “daily” draws on Origen, On Prayer 27, translated by William A. Curtis; the Didache 8.2; John Chrysostom and Jerome on Matthew 6:11, as collected in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea (English edition, Oxford, 1841–45); Jerome’s Latin Vulgate at Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3; the Douay-Rheims Bible and its note on Matthew 6:11; W. C. Allen on Matthew (1907), as quoted by Abbott-Smith; the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2837; and Martin Luther, Small Catechism (1529).

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