Lamb or Little Lamb?
In Revelation, Jesus is represented as a lamb. The word used literally means ‘little lamb’ as it has the diminutive spelling αρνιον (arnion), rather than the normal spelling of ‘lamb’ which would be ἀρην (aren).
Diminutive words are used to emphasize the smallness of the thing being described, a bit like how Spanish speakers add the suffix -ito to make something small or cute.
However, most Bibles only translate it as ‘lamb’, because the standard word for lamb had almost disppeared from Greek texts by this time. It seems that the diminutive spelling just became the normal word for ‘lamb’.
Indeed, the standard spelling does not appear in our source texts very often, and old Egyptian papyrus records of livestock being sold use the Greek diminutive spelling all the time, no matter the size of the animal.
Also, the law in Exodus 12:5 specifies that sacrificial lambs must be one year old. Anyone who knows anything about sheep can tell you that a one year old lamb is not little at all! So clearly the ‘little lamb’ spelling was already very flexible.
This explains why the prophecy in Isaiah 53:7 in the Septuagint uses the normal spelling of ‘lamb’, not the diminutive spelling used in Revelation, even though that’s obviously what Revelation is referencing. Words change their meanings.
For this reason, we agree with other translations, and translate it as ‘lamb’, even though it strictly speaking has the diminutive spelling for ‘little lamb’, apparently that meaning had been lost for quite a while.