Matthew 28:1, Word by Word

Luke and John write mia ton sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on, one of the sabbatons. Mark writes nearly the same words. Matthew records the same morning in his own way, with a carefully built marker of time.

Matthew 28:1 Opse(the latter part of the festival period) yet sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), as it began to dawn toward one sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave.

In the Greek, the opening reads: opse ὀψέ op-seh' de sabbaton, te epiphoskouse eis mian sabbaton (Ὀψὲ δὲ σαββάτων, τῇ ἐπιφωσκούσῃ εἰς μίαν σαββάτων). The YLV renders it word for word: “Opse(the latter part of the festival period) yet sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23), as it began to dawn toward one sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23).”

Twice in One Verse

The word sabbaton appears in the genitive plural, “of the sabbatons,” twelve times in the Greek New Testament. Here they are:

Only one verse among them holds the word twice, and it is Matthew 28:1. Matthew writes the morning of the resurrection with sabbaton on both sides of a single dawn, once for the run of sabbatons in its latter part, still running, and once for the one that was dawning.

The Words One by One

Opse is an adverb of lateness, and what follows it stands in the genitive: late of something. Epiphoskouse is the present participle of epiphosko, to grow light, to dawn. It describes the light as it is coming up, not yet full. Mian is “one,” and after it comes sabbaton again, once more in the genitive plural.

So the noun on both sides of the dawn is the same noun, and on both sides it is plural. What had run late was sabbatons. What was coming up was one of sabbatons.

What Opse Means

Opse appears only three times in the New Testament. Besides Matthew 28:1, Mark uses it twice:

Mark 11:19 When opse(the latter part of the day, afternoon~early evening) came, they would go out of the city.

Mark 13:35 Therefore, be on the alert — for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the opse(the latter part of the day, afternoon~early evening), at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning —

In Mark 11:19 the YLV glosses opse as “the latter part of the day, afternoon~early evening,” and the next verse goes on, “As they were passing by in the morning” (Mark 11:20). In Mark 13:35, opse stands first in a row of four times that follow one another, from the latter part of the day through the night until the morning. In both places, opse marks the latter part of a period while that period is still running. It does not mean the time after the period has ended. In the rhythm of an ordinary day, that latter part is the afternoon from about the ninth hour; when the daytime ends and evening comes, a new day has begun, as Chapter 3 showed.

The same is true in Matthew, where the period is named in the genitive: opse of the sabbatons. The latter part of the sabbatons is still within the sabbatons. That is why the YLV glosses the word in Matthew 28:1 as “the latter part of the festival period.” Matthew is not saying that the sabbatons were over. He is saying that their run had come to its far end.

The Little Word de

Between opse and sabbaton stands the small word de. Matthew uses it forty-four times in the first chapter of his Gospel, thirty-eight of them in the genealogy, to link what comes first to what follows. “Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah” (Matthew 1:2) is in Greek Abraam egennesen ton Isaak, Isaak de egennesen ton Iakob, Iakob de egennesen ton Ioudan. Each de carries the reader one step forward in order.

In Matthew 28:1 the YLV renders it “yet.” The word does not slow the sentence. It carries it forward, from the latter part of the sabbatons to the light that was beginning to rise.

The Two Ends of One Run

Now set the verse on the chart of the Passover week. After the day of preparation came three sabbatons in a row: hap-Pesach on the fourteenth, ham-Matzot on the fifteenth, and Omer Reshit on the sixteenth. They were not one day but a run of days.

Read Matthew against that run, and the two halves of his sentence fall into place. “Opse(the latter part of the festival period) yet sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23)” stands at the far end of the run, in its latter part. The night of the sixteenth was the last night of the three sabbatons, and the first two of them had already been kept. The words “as it began to dawn toward one sabbatons(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23)” point to the daylight of the one still opening: Omer Reshit, the day of the first sheaf. The sheaf was waved in the morning, and Yeshua rose very early, at first light, just before. The resurrection is recorded at the seam between the night and the light of that third sabbaton.

Think of someone who says, near the end of a run of holidays, “Late in the holidays, as the last one was dawning, we set out.” No one would take that to mean an ordinary weekend. The words point to a known run of special days, and to the last of them. Matthew’s words work in the same way. The genitive plural is not a turn of phrase. It is a count, and the chart is that count.

The Text Is Sure

The words of this opening are the same in the major printed Greek texts. Nestle 1904, Scrivener’s Textus Receptus of 1894, and the Robinson–Pierpont Byzantine text of 2018 all read Ὀψὲ δὲ σαββάτων, τῇ ἐπιφωσκούσῃ εἰς μίαν σαββάτων. The reading does not depend on any one manuscript tradition.

Beside the English

The King James Version renders the verse, “In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week.” It follows the reading long settled in English, and by it generations have kept the morning of the resurrection with joy. Nothing here takes that joy away. What is set beside it is only what the Greek numbers: sabbatons, in the plural, on both sides of that dawn.

Matthew 28:1 carries sabbaton twice in the genitive plural, the only verse in the New Testament that does. One stands at the far end of the run of sabbatons, still within it, the other at the one that was dawning. Read with the chart, the plural is the three sabbatons of the Passover week, and the resurrection falls at the dawn of the last of them, Omer Reshit.

Yet many readers have learned that opse means evening, and if it did, the verse would seem to say something else. The New Testament has more than one word that English translates as evening. The next chapter sets them side by side and counts every place they appear.