Luke 16:22

*Abraham's bosom* is a Jewish Second-Temple image of the place of comfort where the righteous dead await the resurrection — preserved in scripture only in this passage, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The Greek kolpon Abraam — literally the bosom of Abraham — draws on the intimate Hebrew idiom of leaning on the bosom of someone honored (cf. John leaning on Jesus's bosom at the Last Supper, John 13:23). The righteous dead rest, in this image, against the side of the patriarch — the father of the faithful — as they wait. Christian interpretive history has variously identified Abraham's bosom as: the holding place of righteous Old Testament saints between death and the resurrection of Christ (the Patristic and medieval reading, sometimes called the limbo of the fathers); a poetic figure for paradise itself (the Reformed reading); or simply a Jewish circumlocution Jesus borrows for narrative effect without canonizing the underlying metaphysics. Modern translations sometimes render bosom as side (BSB) to ease the image for readers unfamiliar with the Hebrew idiom.

• Luke 16
• John 13
• 2 Corinthians 12
• Philippians 1