LXX Word - butter

During a divine visitation to Abraham, God and a couple of angels enjoy buttered biscuits and steak for lunch.

Gen 18:8
LXX: ἔλαβεν δὲ βούτυρον καὶ γάλα καὶ τὸ μοσχάριον, ὃ ἐποίησεν, καὶ παρέθηκεν αὐτοῖς, καὶ ἐφάγοσαν· αὐτὸς δὲ παρειστήκει αὐτοῖς ὑπὸ τὸ δένδρον.

Vulgate: tulit quoque butyrum et lac et vitulum quem coxerat et posuit coram eis ipse vero stabat iuxta eos sub arbore

KJV: And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.

Of course the word βούτυρον caught my eye. Time to look it up and find out if it is the cognate for English's butter. Sure enough.

LSJ:
βού-τῡρον, τό, butter, τὸ πῖον τοῦ γάλακτος Hp.Morb.4.51, cf. Arist.Fr.636, Plu.2.1109b, LXX Ge. 18.8, Sor.1.86, Dsc.2.72, Edict.Diocl.4.50:—also βούτῡρος, ὁ, Gal.13.527. 

OED:
Etymology:  Old English butere weak feminine (in compounds buttor-); < Latin butyrum, < Greek βούτυρον.

Adam Parry on Apostrophe in Homer

 In my previous entry on apostrophe, I speculated that occurrences of second person address used by the narrator in the Odyssey might be best explained as remnants of a previous placement of the Eumaeus sequence. Perhaps at some earlier point in the Homeric tradition a character within the narrative address Eumaeus instead of the narrator, thus making the lines preceding a speech of Eumaeus second person by formula.
 Of course more research is needed, and I began with Adam Parry's 1972 article, which argues that formulaic expressions and epithets in fact contain meaningful content and are for audience response.(1) Also, Parry (1972, 10) argues that meter would never have been an obstacle for the creation/composition of epic verse. For example:

It is time we stopped saying that the poet must have said a thing in this way because no other way existed for him to say it. We do not know what existed, either potentially or actually.

  First, Parry covers the apostrophes in the Iliad addressed to Patroclus. Parry sees in Patroclus the counter-paradigm to other major characters in the Iliad in that he alone is "gentle" (meilikhos). Patroclus, according to Parry, drives the plot of the Iliad in that he alone can tell Achilles how heartless he must be to ignore the suffering of the Greeks. Thus, Parry sets up Patroclus as the sympathetic character par excellence, to whom the bard speaks with great affection. In this case, if Parry is correct, apostrophe indicates a heightened emotional importance of the person addressed in that context.
  Second, Parry discusses the apostrophes involving Menelaus in the Iliad. Parry argues that Menelaus has more at stake in the Trojan war than just glory and honor in battle; he is upholding his right as a husband and leader among the Greeks. The theft of his wife must be requited. Additionally, the gods, Athena and Hera in particular, have a special interest in Menelaus' cause and survival. His moral authority as the mistreated host and husband of Helen keeps the Greeks in the moral high ground. Parry also adduces evidence that Menelaus is a gentle and sympathetic character who stands as a contrast to others, especially his brother Agamemnon. Parry (1972, 19) summarizes his understanding of the apostrophes of Menelaus in the following excerpt:

All these apostrophes appear in scenes which especially reveal aspects of Menelaus' character that the poet elsewhere is at pains to throw into relief; and they occur in connexion with those persons, Patroclus and Achilles, whose relationship with Menelaus again throws light on his character. Did the poet carefully plan out these subtle details of the poem's architecture? Not exactly, we may guess. Rather he had developed, over the years in which he had sung countless versions of these stories, a precise conception of Menelaus' character and his relation to other characters which made these details, including the apostrophes, fall into place.

Footnotes:
(1) Parry (1972) "Language and Characterization in Homer" HSPh 76: 1-22

Apostrophe in the Homeric Narrative

  Although the Homeric narrator maintains a third-person narrative for the vast majority of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, in both epics the narrator departs from this format and directly addresses a character within the tale. This is referred to as apostrophe by scholars.(1) Apostrophe is the rhetorical figure used when a speaker "turns away" from one topic, person, or grammatical construction to another.(2)
  Lengthy and formulaic texts like the Homeric epics naturally train the reader to expect certain expressions and create a sense of appropriate dialogue for the reader. The text teaches the reader how it will communicate over the great length of the text and which characters "should" say what types of things. I do not mean that the the poetry, read or heard, has the intended function of instructing readers and hearers in metapoetics, but that this is one natural result of the experience with the epic poems. In other words, because the narrator of the Odyssey describes the action of the narrative in the third person for the first thirteen books of the epic, the reader naturally develops the expectation that this is the mode of narrative expression. Consequently, the appearance early in the fourteenth book of a second person address from the narrator to one of the characters jars the reader.
  When I encountered this phenomenon during my reading today (Od. 14.55), the shift to second person narration immediately struck me as odd, and I wondered if there were not some textual problem. After a quick check, de Jong (2001) set me on the right path. This has, of course, been noted for some time, and scholars debate the significance of it. These apostrophes in the Odyssey are particularly striking because they only occur at the introduction of the speeches of Eumaeus, Odysseus' pig farmer. Here is de Jong's brief comment on this phenomenon:

Whereas in the Iliad several characters are apostrophized, this happens in the Odyssey only in the case of Eumaeus: cf. 165, 360, 442, 507; 16.60, 135, 464; 17.272, 311, 380, 512, 579; and 22.194. Scholars are divided as to whether the apostrophe is merely a technical device to accommodate names with a difficult metrical shape, or is a narratively significant device designed to focus on or sympathize with characters. The apostrophes of Eumaeus always form part of speech introductions and it would be forced to claim a special effect in all cases. Taken together, however, these passages do reveal the sympathy of the narrator for this gentle character. Only the narrator, Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope address the swineherd by name; the Suitors refer to him as ‘swineherd’.(1)

  I cannot help but wonder if the narrator's second person address to Eumaeus alone in the Odyssey does not represent the epic in a previous form. Although much needs to be researched, I am inclined to think of these apostrophes as remnants of an earlier placement of the entire Eumaeus sequence. In simple terms, the epic trains the reader to think of the narrator using only third person address and the characters alone capable of second person address. So, instead of believing that something unusual has occurred in the Homeric tradition at each apostrophe, it seems possible to view these instances in light of the process of tradition creation. At an earlier point in the tradition of the Odyssey, the Eumaeus sequence might have been spoken by a character, retold by Odysseus after the defeat of the suitors. At the point in the tradition in which the Eumaeus portion of the Odyssey is crystallized from oral performance into written text, it has been moved to another point in the narrative. This would explain the second person addresses.
  More investigation is necessary. This might not answer the reason for the occurrences of apostrophe in the Iliad. Also, there might be a correlation between which character is in dialogue when an apostrophe occurs.

Follow-up sources:

Parry, A. (1972) ‘Language and Characterization in Homer’, HSPh 76: 1–22

Matthews, V. J. (1980) ‘Metrical Reasons for Apostrophe in Homer’, LCM 5: 93–9

Block, E. (1982) ‘The Narrator Speaks: Apostrophe in Homer and Vergil’, TAPhA 112: 7–22

Yamagata, N. (1989) ‘The Apostrophe in Homer as Part of the Oral Technique’, BICS 36: 91–103

Footnotes:
(1) de Jong (2001) A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, 345.
(2) Anderson (2000) Glossary of Greek Rhetorical Terms, 25 and 16-17 under alloiosis.