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ἔμπροσθεν

before

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

G1715 Strong's Greek
émprosthen Transliteration
/em'-pros-then/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 48 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.

εμπροσθεν (émprosthen) is a Greek verb most often rendered “before.” Its lexical range runs to 4 senses. It turns up in 45 verses across 11 books, a moderately common footprint. It concentrates in Matthew, which alone accounts for 36% of its uses. It first appears in Matthew 5:16. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
against
Modern gloss
before
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G1715 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 →

45
distinct verses
The word appears in 45 distinct verses.
11 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 11 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 5:16
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 5:16.
Revelation 22:8
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:8.
#322
by frequency
Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 322 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 45 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 32 · 71%
  • Acts 2 · 4%
  • Pauline Epistles 7 · 16%
  • General Epistles 1 · 2%
  • Revelation 3 · 7%

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 45 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 32 verses · 71%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 11 verses · 24%
  • Johannine 9 verses · 20%
  • Pauline corpus 7 verses · 16%
  • Revelation 3 verses · 7%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 2%

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: Before 40×, Sight 3×
  • American Standard Version: Before 39×, Down before 2×, In 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Before 25×, Ahead 3×, Front of 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Before 36×, Ahead 4×, Front of 4×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G1715 across 49 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Before” 40×
  • “Sight” 3×

Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G1715 across 47 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Before” 39×
  • “Down before” 2×
  • “In” 2×

Plus 4 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 G1715 across 46 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Before” 25×
  • “Ahead” 3×
  • “Front of” 3×
  • “Presence” 3×
  • “Ahead of” 2×
  • “At” 2×
  • “Sight” 2×
  • “Surpassed” 2×

Plus 4 renderings that appear 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.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G1715 across 48 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Before” 36×
  • “Ahead” 4×
  • “Front of” 4×
  • “Greater than” 2×

Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.


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. before, i.e. in that local region which is in front of a person or thing
  2. before, in the presence of, i.e. opposite to, over against one
  3. before, in the sight of
  4. before, denoting rank

Word origin

Derived from εν (en) (G1722).

Part of speech: Adverb

From G1722 and G4314 ; in front of (in place [literally or figuratively] or time): - against at before (in presence sight) of.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 3 distinct written forms G1715 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἔμπροσθεν émprosthen Preposition Matthew 5:16 39
ἔμπροσθέν émprosthén Preposition Matthew 6:2 8
ἔνπροσθεν énprosthen Adverb Revelation 4:6 1

Same root — word family


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word εμπροσθεν appears 124 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 121 verses in 26 books.

124
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
121
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
26 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 26 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1715) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 121. 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 (G1715) 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.