When John the Baptist stood knee-deep in the Jordan and pointed at Jesus, the word he reached for was ἀμνός (amnos) — and it’s worth noticing how rare a word that is. In the whole New Testament amnos appears only four times, and every single one of them is about Jesus. Twice here in John, where the Baptist cries “Look, the Lamb of God.” Once in Acts, where a court official is reading Isaiah’s “like a lamb led to the slaughter” and Philip uses that very verse to tell him about Jesus. And once in First Peter, which speaks of being redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” Four uses, all of Jesus, all of them sacrificial.

That’s the company amnos keeps. It is the ordinary, dignified word for a sacrificial lamb — the word that runs all through the Greek Old Testament for the lambs offered on the altar, where it turns up about a hundred times: the Passover lamb, the daily temple lambs, the lambs of the festivals. It is the lamb of the cult, the lamb that is given and slain. So when the Baptist says amnos, he isn’t reaching for a soft pastoral image. He’s reaching for the altar.

And he, of all people, would have known the altar from the inside. The Gospel of Luke tells us his father, Zechariah, was a priest — one of the men whose work was the offering of those very lambs. The Baptist was a priest’s son, raised inside the rhythm of the morning lamb and the evening lamb, the Passover slaughter, the smell of it. For him, “lamb” was not a metaphor. It was the daily, bloody, holy business of his own family.

What makes amnos so resonant is that it doesn’t point to just one lamb. A first-century Jew on that riverbank had several famous lambs ready to hand — the Passover lamb whose blood turned death aside, the servant of Isaiah 53 who “bore the sin of many” and was led silently to the slaughter, the lamb Abraham promised God would provide on Moriah. The single lamb-word could summon any of them, or all of them at once. The Baptist said amnos, and the word opened onto a whole room of lambs.

Notice, too, the word the Baptist did not use. Elsewhere — in the book of Revelation, on the traditional view of common authorship — the lamb-word for Jesus is arnion, the conquering-yet-slain Lamb. At the river, the word is amnos, the lamb of sacrifice. He chose the word soaked in a hundred offerings. Every lamb that word could summon was a lamb that cost something, a lamb bound up with God’s rescue of his people. That much, whichever lamb you hear, the word never lets you forget.