Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

εἴδωλον

idol

‘idol’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓

G1497 Strong's Greek
eídōlon Transliteration
/i'-do-lon/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 11 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

At its core, ειδωλον (eídōlon) means “idol.” Catalogued under 4 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. It turns up in 11 verses across 7 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to 1 Corinthians (36%), then Acts and Romans. Scripture first uses it in Acts 7:41. Dig into 11-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
idol
Modern gloss
idol
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G1497 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 →

11
distinct verses
The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
7 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
Acts 7:41
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Acts 7:41.
Revelation 9:20
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 9:20.
#978
by frequency
Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 978 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 11 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 0 · 0%
  • Acts 2 · 18%
  • Pauline Epistles 7 · 64%
  • General Epistles 1 · 9%
  • Revelation 1 · 9%

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 11 distinct verses.

  • Pauline corpus 7 verses · 64%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 18%
  • Johannine 2 verses · 18%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 9%
  • Revelation 1 verse · 9%

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: Idols 7×, Idol 4×
  • American Standard Version: Idols 7×, Idol 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Idols 7×, Idol 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Idols 8×, Idol 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G1497 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Idols” 7×
  • “Idol” 4×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G1497 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Idols” 7×
  • “Idol” 3×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G1497 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Idols” 7×
  • “Idol” 3×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 G1497 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Idols” 8×
  • “Idol” 3×

Senses in Thayer's

The 4 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.

  1. i.e. whatever represents the form of an object, either real or imaginary
  2. used of the shades of the departed, apparitions, spectres, phantoms of the mind, etc.
  3. the image of an heathen god
  4. a false god

Word origin

Derived from ειδος (eîdos) (G1491) — appearance.

Part of speech: Noun Neuter TDNT: 08:15,2

From G1491 ; an image (that is for worship); by implication a heathen god or (plural) the worship of such : - idol.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 6 distinct written forms G1497 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
εἰδώλων eidṓlōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter Acts 15:20 4
εἴδωλα eídōla Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Romans 2:22 3
εἰδώλου eidṓlou Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter 1 Corinthians 8:7 1
εἰδώλῳ eidṓlō Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter Acts 7:41 1
εἴδωλον eídōlon Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter 1 Corinthians 8:4 1
εἴδωλόν eídōlón Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter 1 Corinthians 10:19 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1497, 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

Derived from this word

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word ειδωλον appears 72 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 69 verses in 19 books.

72
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
69
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
19 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 19 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1497) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 69. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.

These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1497) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.