The sole LXX usage of this word is:cwconrad in the Burial/burying ἐνταφιάζειν, θάπτειν thread wrote:Acts 8:2I'd think the place to start on something like this is Louw & Nida, specifically §52 "Funerals and Burial".συνεκόμισαν δὲ τὸν Στέφανον ἄνδρες εὐλαβεῖς καὶ ἐποίησαν κοπετὸν μέγαν ἐπ᾿ αὐτῷ.
(I have "guessed" the translation of θιμωνιὰ ἅλωνος to fit the positive sentiment of the passage).Job 5:26 wrote:ἐλεύσῃ δὲ ἐν τάφῳ ὥσπερ σῖτος ὥριμος κατὰ καιρὸν θεριζόμενος ἢ ὥσπερ θιμωνιὰ ἅλωνος καθ’ ὥραν συγκομισθεῖσα
You will come to your grave like ripe grain being harvested at the right time or like a pile of grain which is gathered on the threshing floor at the proper time each year.
If we imagine that the choice of συγκομίζειν to describe the action of the young men was an allusion to the metaphore in Job, then that suggests that Stephen's death was a good death. I think that unless that verse in Job was a commonly quoted one at funerals this line of enquiry about the meaning of the word is obscure at best.
Another way to take it is
Finding an answer in an authoritative book is always a good thin, but that solution in itself is not as simple as it looks. The word we really want to be considering the denotive sense of is κομίζειν. But for now let's ask, what the meaning of the συν- prefixed to the κομίζω is.[url=http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dsugkomi%2Fzw]LSJ συγκομίζω[/url] ΙΙ wrote:help in burying or cremating, “τόνδε τὸν νεκρὸν . . μὴ συγκομίζειν” S.Aj.1048; ἔφθη τὸ σῶμα συγκομισθέν the body was already cremated, Plu.Sull.38, cf. Ages.19.
Does the συν- of συγκομίζω "bring together" mean συν- like as in συλλέγω "gather together" (one person getting a whole lot of little things together) or συν- like as in συνθάπτω "bury together" (when many people are put into the same grave). That is the reason for my inital question about whether the body of Stephen was dismembered and needed to be gathered together - "They brought together (the pieces of) the body of Stephen", or "They worked together to fetch the body of Stephen."
Another point is the meaning of κομίζω, which has the basic meaning of "take care of", "attend to". For a dead person, the logical thing to do is to burry or cremate their body. And in that case the συν- means "work together to do", "play a part in ... -ing" or put simply "help to".
Because the word κομίζειν "attend to (the body)" is used not θάπτειν "bury (the body)", it is possible that burial was not what was done - the other possible way of dealing with it is cremation.
There is also the suggestion in LSJ's entry that συγκομίζειν "take the body home" is what one does when one does not θάπτειν "bury the body". That then would imply an earlier-than-is-usually-accepted-in-scholarly-literature beginning for the cult of the martyrs. The account of the finding of the body of St. Stephen says that a coffin or chest which had been buried under a pile of stones was opened in the 5th century.
For a word used only once in New Testament there are more plausible ways of reading it than for other similar words:bring together (collect), together bring (helped to collect), took home (didn't bury, perhaps to venerate), bring in the harvest of a life given for Christ, OR cremate.
As for κομίζειν's relationship to θάπτειν, it could be either a mutually exclusive opposite, or θάπτειν could be part of the meaning of κομίζειν. κομίζειν could be the general sense of do what should be done to the body, while ἐνταφιάζειν could be more looking at the specific steps, one of which is θάπτειν.
My suspicion about the inter-relationship between them is; I'm going to κομίζειν for the dead, so I will have to go through all the things needed to ἐνταφιάζειν, which includes θάπτειν the body.