sister

A term referring to physical or spiritual kinship. Marriages were prohibited with one’s full or half sister (Lev 18). Yet “sister” is used for the beloved in (Song 4:9-11), perhaps referring to fictive kinship ties. Members of Jesus’s circle were “brother, sister, and mother” (Matt 12:50). The co-worker Phoebe was Paul’s metaphorical or figurative “sister” (Rom 16:1); young women in the churches of the pastoral Letters of the NT were also called “sisters” (1Tim 5:2).