ἐνάρχομαι
to begin
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Middle deponent
- Middle in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G1728 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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.
Galatians 1 verse
Philippians 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.
“to begin” is the headline sense of the Greek verb εναρχομαι (enárchomai). A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. More than half of its appearances fall in Galatians. Its earliest occurrence is Galatians 3:3. Related forms include εν, εγγραφω and εγγυος. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1728 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Galatians 1 verse 50%
- Philippians 1 verse 50%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 100%
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: Having begun 1×, He which hath begun 1×
- American Standard Version: Having begun 1×, He who began 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: After starting 1×, Began 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Having begun 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1728 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1728 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1728 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1728 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.
- to begin, to make a beginning
Word origin
Derived from εν (en) (G1722).
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G1728 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐναρξάμενοι enarxámenoi | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Galatians 3:3 | 1 |
| ἐναρξάμενος enarxámenos | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Philippians 1:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1728, 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
- εγγραφω engráphō G1449 to inscribe
- εγγυος éngyos G1450 surety
- εγκαθετος enkáthetos G1455 to spy
- εγκαινια enkaínia G1456 dedication
- εγκαλεω enkaléō G1458 to accuse
- εγκαταλειπω enkataleípō G1459 to abandon
- εγκατοικεω enkatoikéō G1460 to dwell
- εγκεντριζω enkentrízō G1461 to graft
- εγκομβοομαι enkombóomai G1463 band
- εγκοπτω enkóptō G1465 to hinder
- εγκρατης enkratḗs G1468 strong
- εγκρινω enkrínō G1469 to judge worthy
- εγκρυπτω enkrýptō G1470 to conceal
- εγκυος énkyos G1471 pregnant
- εγχριω enchríō G1472 to anoint
- ελλογεω ellogéō G1677 impute
- εμβαινω embaínō G1684 to enter
- εμβαλλω embállō G1685 to cast in
- εμβαπτω embáptō G1686 to dip in
- εμβατευω embateúō G1687 to enter
- εμβιβαζω embibázō G1688 to lead in
- εμβλεπω emblépō G1689 to look at
- εμβριμαομαι embrimáomai G1690 to warn sternly
- εμμαινομαι emmaínomai G1693 to rage against
+58 more words share this root (not shown).
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 84 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word εναρχομαι appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 5 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 8
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 12:18 ἐνἄρχω
- Numbers 9:5 ἐνἄρχω
- Deuteronomy 2:24 ἐνἄρχω
- Joshua 10:24 ἐνἄρχω
- Proverbs 13:12 ἐνἄρχω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1728) 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 12:18 ἐνἄρχω In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread, until the twenty first day of the month at evening.
- Numbers 9:5 ἐνἄρχω They kept the Passover in the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at evening, in the wilderness of Sinai. According to all that Yahweh commanded Moses, so the children of Israel did.
- Numbers 17:12 ἐνἄρχω The children of Israel spoke to Moses, saying, Behold, we perish, we are undone, we are all undone.
- Deuteronomy 2:24 ἐνἄρχω Rise up, take your journey, and pass over the valley of the Arnon: behold, I have given into your hand Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his land; begin to possess it, and contend with him in battle.
- Deuteronomy 2:25 ἐνἄρχω This day will I begin to put the dread of you and the fear of you on the peoples who are under the whole sky, who shall hear the report of you, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of you.
- Deuteronomy 2:31 ἐνἄρχω Yahweh said to me, Behold, I have begun to deliver up Sihon and his land before you: begin to possess, that you may inherit his land.
- Joshua 10:24 ἐνἄρχω It happened, when they brought forth those kings to Joshua, that Joshua called for all the men of Israel, and said to the chiefs of the men of war who went with him, Come near, put your feet on the necks of these kings. They came near, and put their feet on the necks of them.
- Proverbs 13:12 ἐνἄρχω Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But when longing is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1728) 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.
