Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

ἐπίσταμαι

to attend to

G1987 Strong's Greek
epístamai Transliteration
/ep-is'-tam-ahee/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 15 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.

επισταμαι — transliterated epístamai — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to attend to.” More than half of its appearances fall in Acts. It appears 15 verses across 7 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. Debuting at Mark 14:68, it then recurs through the corpus. Related forms include εφιστημι and επιστημων. See the sense tree, 15-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
know
Modern gloss
to attend to
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 G1987 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 →

15
distinct verses
The word appears in 15 distinct verses.
7 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
Mark 14:68
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Mark 14:68.
Jude 1:10
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Jude 1:10.
#768
by frequency
Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 768 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 15 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 1 · 7%
  • Acts 9 · 60%
  • Pauline Epistles 2 · 13%
  • General Epistles 3 · 20%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

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 15 distinct verses.

  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 9 verses · 60%
  • Pauline corpus 2 verses · 13%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 13%
  • Gospels 1 verse · 7%
  • Hebrews 1 verse · 7%

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: Know 4×, Knowing 3×, Ye know 2×
  • American Standard Version: Knowing 2×, Ye know 2×, Yourselves know 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Know 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Know 5×, Knowing 2×, You 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G1987 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Know” 4×
  • “Knowing” 3×
  • “Ye know” 2×

Plus 5 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 G1987 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Knowing” 2×
  • “Ye know” 2×
  • “Yourselves know” 2×

Plus 8 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 G1987 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Know” 3×

Plus 11 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 G1987 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Know” 5×
  • “Knowing” 2×
  • “You” 2×

Plus 12 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 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.

  1. to put one's attention on, fix one's thoughts on, to turn one's self or one's mind to, put one's thought upon a thing

Word origin

Derived from εφιστημι (ephístēmi) (G2186) — to place upon.

Part of speech: Verb

Apparently a middle voice of G2186 (with G3563 implied); to put the mind upon that is comprehend or be acquainted with : - know understand.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 5 distinct written forms G1987 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἐπίστασθε epístasthe Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural Acts 10:28 5
ἐπιστάμενος epistámenos Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Acts 18:25 4
ἐπίσταμαι epístamai Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 1st person, Singular Mark 14:68 2
ἐπίστανται epístantai Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural Acts 22:19 2
ἐπίσταται epístatai Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular Acts 26:26 2

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1987, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word επισταμαι appears 46 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 45 verses in 11 books.

46
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
45
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
11 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 11 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1987) 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 (G1987) 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.