ελκυω
to draw
‘to draw’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G1670 appears — 8 distinct verses across 3 books. 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.
John 5 verses
- John 6:44 ἑλκύσῃ aor act subj 3sg No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up in the last day.
- John 12:32 ἑλκύσω fut act ind 1sg And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."
- John 18:10 εἵλκυσεν aor act ind 3sg Simon Peter therefore, having a sword, drew it, and struck the high priest's servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus.
- John 21:6 ἑλκύσαι aor act inf He said to them, "Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some." They cast it therefore, and now they weren't able to draw it in for the multitude of fish.
- John 21:11 εἵλκυσεν aor act ind 3sg Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of great fish, one hundred fifty-three; and even though there were so many, the net wasn't torn.
Acts 2 verses
- Acts 16:19 εἵλκυσαν aor act ind 3pl But when her masters saw that the hope of their gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas, and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers.
- Acts 21:30 εἷλκον impf act ind 3pl All the city was moved, and the people ran together. They seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple. Immediately the doors were shut.
James 1 verse
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.
ελκυω (helkýō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to draw.” John dominates its distribution — 5 of 8 verses. Spanning 8 verses in 3 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. It first appears in John 6:44. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1670 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,240
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,240 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
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 8 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 63%
- Johannine 5 verses · 63%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 25%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 13%
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: Drew 4×, Draw 2×
- American Standard Version: Dragged 2×, Draw 2×, Drew 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Dragged 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Drag 1×, Dragged them 1×, Dragging him 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1670 across 7 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1670 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 G1670 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 G1670 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 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.
- to draw, drag off
- metaph., to draw by inward power, lead, impel
Word origin
Derived from αιρεομαι (hairéomai) (G138) — to choose.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms G1670 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| εἵλκυσεν heílkysen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | John 18:10 | 2 |
| εἵλκυσαν heílkysan | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 16:19 | 1 |
| εἷλκον heîlkon | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 21:30 | 1 |
| ἑλκύσαι helkýsai | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | John 21:6 | 1 |
| ἑλκύσω helkýsō | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | John 12:32 | 1 |
| ἑλκύσῃ helkýsē | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular | John 6:44 | 1 |
| ἕλκουσιν hélkousin | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | James 2:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1670, 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
- αιρεσις haíresis G139 choice
- αιρετιζω hairetízō G140 to choose
- αλωσις hálōsis G259 capture
- αρπαζω harpázō G726 to seize
- 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 15 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ελκυω appears 1 time in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1 verse in 1 book.
- 1
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 1
- verse
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Deuteronomy 21:3 ἑλκύω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1670) 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.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1670) 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.
