Salutations

Salutations are the words and gestures by which people greet, welcome, and take leave of one another in Scripture — bowing to the ground, spoken blessings, kisses, wishes of peace, and the opening and closing greetings of letters.

The most common gesture in the text is prostration. Abraham runs from his tent door and bows himself to the earth before three strangers (Genesis 18:2), and Lot does the same before the two angels at the gate of Sodom (Genesis 19:1). Established Hebrew usage matters here: the same verb, shachah, describes the homage offered to a human superior and the worship offered to God, so the posture alone does not fix the meaning — context does. It marks reverent courtesy in Genesis 18–19, and it marks familial submission in the dreams and blessings of Genesis 27:29, 37:10, and 49:8. The Greek of Matthew 2:11 uses proskyneō, a verb that likewise covers both homage paid to a person of rank and worship offered to God; the Gospel presents the magi's falling down as worship of the child.

Spoken salutations are equally concrete. Boaz greets his reapers with "May Yahweh be with you," and they answer, "May Yahweh bless you" (Ruth 2:4) — a blessing exchanged rather than a bare hello. Lot's greeting carries an offer of hospitality: come into the house, stay the night, wash your feet (Genesis 19:2). Jesus instructs his messengers to say first, "Peace be to this house" (Luke 10:5), and the risen Jesus greets the disciples with "Peace be to you" (John 20:21); the underlying Hebrew shalom and Greek eirēnē carry a wish for wholeness and well-being, not merely an absence of conflict. A kiss could seal a greeting, as Joab's did when he took Amasa by the beard — the text shows the gesture used to deceive (2 Samuel 20:9).

Letter salutations appear as their own form. Paul closes Colossians with "Grace be with you," written in his own hand as a mark of authenticity (Colossians 4:18), distinguishing the farewell from the body of the letter. Christian traditions differ on how much weight such forms carry: liturgical churches retain a formal exchange of peace and fixed greeting and blessing formulas in worship, while many Free Church and Protestant bodies treat them as ordinary courtesy or spontaneous expression; the Religious Society of Friends historically refused honorific greetings and the bowing of the body to social superiors as a matter of conscience. Readers also divide over whether greetings like "Grace be with you" function as pronouncements of blessing or as conventional epistolary courtesy, and over how far the homage of Matthew 2:11 is a greeting to a king and how far it is confessed worship.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.