αἵρεσις
choice
‘choice’ is one of 5 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
3 distinct verses where G139 appears in the Genitive case, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Greek form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Greek New Testament; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences of this word are not indexed here.
Acts 3 verses
- Acts 15:5 αἱρέσεως n gen sg fem But some of the sect of the Pharisees who believed rose up, saying, "It is necessary to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses."
- Acts 24:5 αἱρέσεως n gen sg fem For we have found this man to be a plague, an instigator of insurrections among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.
- Acts 28:22 αἱρέσεως n gen sg fem But we desire to hear from you what you think. For, as concerning this sect, it is known to us that everywhere it is spoken against."
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
“choice” is the headline sense of the Greek noun αιρεσις (haíresis). It clusters heavily in Acts, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. With 9 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. First canonically at Acts 5:17, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 5 senses. See the sense tree, 9-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G139 catalogs a Greek word from the Greek New Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Greek New Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,140
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,140 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 6 verses 67%
- 1 Corinthians 1 verse 11%
- Galatians 1 verse 11%
By section of the New Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Some books belong to more than one corpus (Luke is in both the Gospels and the Lukan corpus, and so on), so these shares overlap and need not total 100%. Each figure is a share of the word’s 9 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 6 verses · 67%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 22%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 11%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Sect 5×, Heresies 3×
- American Standard Version: Sect 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sect 4×, Party 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Sect 6×, Factions 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G139 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G139 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G139 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G139 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in Thayer's
The 5 senses Thayer's distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- act of taking, capture: e.g. storming a city
- choosing, choice
- that which is chosen
- a body of men following their own tenets (sect or party)
- dissensions arising from diversity of opinions and aims
Word origin
Derived from αιρεομαι (hairéomai) (G138) — to choose.
From G138 ; properly a choice that is (specifically) a party or (abstractly) disunion . (heresy is the Greek word itself.): - heresy [which is the Greekord itself] sect.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G139 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| αἱρέσεις hairéseis | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | 1 Corinthians 11:19 | 3 |
| αἱρέσεως hairéseōs | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Acts 15:5 | 3 |
| αἵρεσιν haíresin | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Acts 24:14 | 2 |
| αἵρεσις haíresis | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Acts 5:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G139, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
- αιρετιζω hairetízō G140 to choose
- αλωσις hálōsis G259 capture
- αρπαζω harpázō G726 to seize
- ελκυω helkýō G1670 to draw
- ηλιος hḗlios G2246 sun
- θελω thélō G2309 to will
- ιλεως híleōs G2436 merciful
- σεληνη selḗnē G4582 moon
- σπειρα speîra G4686 cohort
- συλαω syláō G4813 to rob
- συρω sýrō G4951 to drag
- τιλλω tíllō G5089 to pluck
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 14 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αιρεσις appears 3 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 3 verses in 2 books.
- 3
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 3
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 49:5 αἵρεσις
- Leviticus 22:18 αἵρεσις
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G139) appears in the Greek Septuagint. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.
- Genesis 49:5 αἵρεσις "Simeon and Levi are brothers; Weapons of violence are their swords.
- Leviticus 22:18 αἵρεσις "Speak to Aaron, and to his sons, and to all the children of Israel, and say to them, 'Whoever is of the house of Israel, or of the foreigners in Israel, who offers his offering, whether it be any of their vows, or any of their freewill offerings, which they offer to Yahweh for a burnt offering;
- Leviticus 22:21 αἵρεσις Whoever offers a sacrifice of peace offerings to Yahweh to accomplish a vow, or for a freewill offering, of the herd or of the flock, it shall be perfect to be accepted; there shall be no blemish therein.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G139) in the Septuagint — not a translation of any one Hebrew word. The store carries no word-level Hebrew↔Greek alignment, so no Hebrew original is asserted here. Counts come from the recovered LXX Strong's tagging — high-frequency vocabulary is well covered, while rare or late forms may be untagged — so they reflect tagged occurrences and may slightly undercount.
