ἐλεήμων
merciful
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G1655 appears in the Book of Matthew — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Matthew
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.
“merciful” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective ελεημων (eleḗmōn). A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. More than half of its appearances fall in Matthew. First canonically at Matthew 5:7, it enters the text early. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1655 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Gospels 1 verse · 50%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 50%
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: Are the merciful 1×, Merciful 1×
- American Standard Version: Are the merciful 1×, Merciful 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Merciful 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Merciful 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1655 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1655 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1655 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1655 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 1 sense 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.
- merciful
Word origin
Derived from ελεεω (eleéō) (G1653) — to have mercy.
From G1653 ; compassionate (actively): - merciful.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G1655 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐλεήμονες eleḗmones | Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 5:7 | 1 |
| ἐλεήμων eleḗmōn | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Hebrews 2:17 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ελεημων appears 17 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 17 verses in 7 books.
- 17
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 17
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 22:26 ἐλεήμων
- 2 Chronicles 30:9 ἐλεήμων
- Ezra 19:17 ἐλεήμων
- Psalms 85:15 ἐλεήμων
- Proverbs 11:17 ἐλεήμων
- Jeremiah 3:12 ἐλεήμων
- Joel 2:13 ἐλεήμων
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1655) 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.
- Exodus 22:26 ἐλεήμων If you take your neighbor's garment as collateral, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down,
- Exodus 34:6 ἐλεήμων Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, "Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth,
- 2 Chronicles 30:9 ἐλεήμων For if you turn again to Yahweh, your brothers and your children shall find compassion before those who led them captive, and shall come again into this land: for Yahweh your God is gracious and merciful, and will not turn away his face from you, if you return to him.
- Ezra 19:17 ἐλεήμων
- Ezra 19:31 ἐλεήμων
- Psalms 85:15 ἐλεήμων
- Psalms 102:8 ἐλεήμων My enemies reproach me all day. Those who are mad at me use my name as a curse.
- Psalms 110:4 ἐλεήμων Yahweh has sworn, and will not change his mind: "You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek."
- Psalms 111:4 ἐλεήμων He has caused his wonderful works to be remembered. Yahweh is gracious and merciful.
- Psalms 114:5 ἐλεήμων What was it, you sea, that you fled? You Jordan, that you turned back?
- Psalms 144:8 ἐλεήμων Whose mouths speak deceit, Whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.
- Proverbs 11:17 ἐλεήμων The merciful man does good to his own soul, But he who is cruel troubles his own flesh.
- Proverbs 19:11 ἐλεήμων The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger. It is his glory to overlook an offense.
- Proverbs 20:6 ἐλεήμων Many men claim to be men of unfailing love, But who can find a faithful man?
- Proverbs 28:22 ἐλεήμων A stingy man hurries after riches, And doesn't know that poverty waits for him.
- Jeremiah 3:12 ἐλεήμων Go, and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, Return, you backsliding Israel, says Yahweh; I will not look in anger on you; for I am merciful, says Yahweh, I will not keep [anger] forever.
- Joel 2:13 ἐλεήμων Tear your heart, and not your garments, And turn to Yahweh, your God; For he is gracious and merciful, Slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, And relents from sending calamity.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1655) 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.
