The curious noun αμμος (ammos) means sand and, although of unclear pedigree, is part of a small cluster of apparently related synonyms: αμαθος (amathos), υφαμμος (uphammos), ψαμμος (psammos); all meaning sand in vague nuances and obvious testimony that sand was to Greeks what snow is to Eskimos.

But note that the understanding that living things were made from the dust of mother earth (compare Genesis 2:7 to Psalm 139:13) was rather broadly attested in antiquity. Our noun αμμος (ammos), sand, is certainly similar to αμμα (amma), the familiar term for μητηρ (meter), mother — in Hebrew: אמה ('umma), means people and אם ('em), means mother. Our English words "matter" and "material" indeed derive from these broadly attested words for "mother".

Sand, of course, is proverbially innumerable and shifty, but that's only from the perspective of a rock, not from the perspective of the roaring sea. Sand is where dry land begins — and in antiquity, dry land broadly referred to solid reason whereas waters referred to emotions. The Hebrew name for Greece was Javan, which means mud, and mud could be baked into bricks by means of πυρ (pur), fire.

Sand is a quality of a dry-land wilderness, certainly a step up from the utter lawlessness of water, but still quite void of any universal laws that allows the binding of any loose things into larger structures. Its opposite is the πολις (polis), city, which is the state of hyper-order and hyper-connectedness that can only come about from the written word. Mere speech is much better than no speech at all, which is why the Hebrew word for wilderness is מדבר (midbar), from the root דבר (dabar), meaning "word" or science or Logos.

The Hebrew Bible tells of a man named Ammon, son of Lot and patriarch of the Ammonites. More relevant, probably, is an important shepherd deity — and note the Greek word for lamb, namely αμνος (amnos) — called Ammon, who originated in Ethiopia, was imported into Egypt and Libya (as Ammun or Amon) and from there to Greece. What his name originally meant is not so relevant; by the time he came to Greece it meant Sand and Ammos became Zeus Ammos. When Jesus warned to not build one's house on sand (Matthew 7:26), nobody in his original audience would have missed the obvious pun.

The pun continues in our modern age in the term "amino acid", which denotes the building blocks of proteins and thus life itself. This term derives from the Latin phrase "sal ammoniacus", which described a kind of salt found near a major temple of Ammon (i.e. Jupiter or Zeus) in the Roman province of Cyrenaica.

Our noun αμμος (ammos) is used 5 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.

The noun αμοιβη (amoibe) means a change or an exchange (hence the amoeba). It occurs in the New Testament in 1 Timothy 5:4 only, and although it officially has nothing to do with the above, native Greek speakers may not necessarily have found this very obvious.

Our noun stems from the verb αμειβω (ameibo), to change or exchange or give in exchange. This verb could be used for all sorts of exchanges, from commercial supply and demand to rhetoric and banter. In the sense of to recompense or to fairly exchange, this word comes close to the familiar Hebrew verb שלם (shalem), to make whole or complete. Ultimately, our verb is part of the same Proto-Indo-European root "hmey-" from which Latin obtained its familiar verb migro, to wander (hence the English verb to migrate).

The verb αμυνω (amuno) means to defend and is very common in the classics — it occurs all over the Iliad, often in company of λοιγος (loigos), ruin or destruction, against which the gods defend our heroes. Note that this verb is somewhat of a synonym of the verb αλεξω (alexo), to ward off, whence the name Alexander (which means The Defense Of The Men).

Common as our verb αμυνω (amuno) is in the classics, in the New Testament it occurs in Acts 7:24 only, in a reference by Stephen to Moses, and particularly the latter's defense of the Israelite who was getting a beating from his Egyptian overlord. This defense, as everybody knows, resulted in Moses killing the Egyptian, because of which he had to flee his adoptive home at the Egyptian court. Moses then fled to Midian in Arabia, where he met the priest Jethro, under whose tutelage he designed what would become the Hebrew Republic (see our article on Gog and Magog for more on the Hebrew Republic).

After Homer, our verb acquired the additional nuance of revenge or avenging oneself upon one's enemies: to punish or repay.

Our verb αμυνω (amuno) is thought to stem from the same Indo-European root "mun-" from which Latin gets the verb munire, to defend (with a wall), and hence the noun moenia, city walls. In English, we have the word (am)munition from this root. A second root, which is identical to the first and may very well be the same one, has to do with (ex)changing, and gave rise to words like municipality and community.