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ἐσθίω

to eat

‘to eat’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

G2068 Strong's Greek
esthíō Transliteration
/es-thee'-o/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 65 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.

εσθιω (esthíō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to eat.” One archaism survives in the King James Version — “eateth” — where modern Bibles read “eat”; see the renderings breakdown. Spanning 55 verses in 8 books, it ranks among the moderately common words of the Greek New Testament. 1 Corinthians dominates its distribution — 15 of 55 verses. Ranging over 3 senses, it is not a single-sense word. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
devour
Modern gloss
to eat
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 G2068 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 →

55
distinct verses
The word appears in 55 distinct verses.
8 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 8 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 9:11
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 9:11.
Hebrews 10:27
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Hebrews 10:27.
#256
by frequency
Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 256 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 55 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 32 · 58%
  • Acts 1 · 2%
  • Pauline Epistles 21 · 38%
  • General Epistles 1 · 2%
  • 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 55 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 32 verses · 58%
  • Pauline corpus 21 verses · 38%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 13 verses · 24%
  • Hebrews 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: Eat 19×, Eateth 12×, Did eat 5×
  • American Standard Version: Eat 16×, Eateth 13×, Eating 5×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Eat 16×, Eating 8×, Eats 6×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Eat 62×, Eating 22×, Ate 11×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2068 across 66 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eat” 19×
  • “Eateth” 12×
  • “Did eat” 5×
  • “Eating” 5×
  • “He that eateth” 3×
  • “He eateth” 2×
  • “Let him eat” 2×
  • “They did eat” 2×
  • “They eat” 2×
  • “Ye eat” 2×

Plus 12 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 G2068 across 66 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eat” 16×
  • “Eateth” 13×
  • “Eating” 5×
  • “Were eating” 4×
  • “Did eat” 3×
  • “Let him eat” 3×
  • “As” 2×
  • “He eateth” 2×
  • “He that eateth” 2×
  • “They ate” 2×
  • “They that did eat” 2×

Plus 12 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 G2068 across 61 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eat” 16×
  • “Eating” 8×
  • “Eats” 6×
  • “Were eating” 4×
  • “They eat” 3×
  • “Fed” 2×
  • “They were eating” 2×
  • “You eat” 2×

Plus 18 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 4 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2068 across 183 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eat” 62×
  • “Eating” 22×
  • “Ate” 11×
  • “Eats” 6×
  • “They” 5×
  • “They might eat” 5×
  • “Does” 4×
  • “Might eat” 4×
  • “You might eat” 4×
  • “Do” 3×
  • “It” 3×
  • “Let him eat” 3×

Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 31 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 3 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. to eat
  2. to take food, eat a meal
  3. metaph. to devour, consume

Word origin

Derived from φαγω (phágō) (G5315) — to eat.

Part of speech: Verb TDNT: 13:29,3

strengthened for a primary word ἔδω edō (to eat ); used only in certain tenses the rest being supplied by G5315 ; to eat (usually literally): - devour eat live.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 18 distinct written forms G2068 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἐσθίων esthíōn Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 11:18 11
ἐσθίει esthíei Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular Matthew 9:11 9
ἐσθίουσιν esthíousin Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural Mark 7:2 8
ἐσθίετε esthíete Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural Luke 10:8 6
ἐσθίειν esthíein Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive Matthew 12:1 6
ἤσθιον ḗsthion Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural Luke 6:1 4
ἐσθίοντες esthíontes Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 14:21 3
ἐσθιέτω esthiétō Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 3rd person, Singular 1 Corinthians 11:28 3
ἐσθιόντων esthióntōn Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 26:21 3
ἐσθίοντα esthíonta Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Romans 14:3 2
ἐσθίωσιν esthíōsin Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Plural Matthew 15:2 2
ἐσθίῃ esthíē Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular Matthew 24:49 2
ἐσθίητε esthíēte Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Plural 1 Corinthians 11:26 1
ἐσθίοντι esthíonti Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Dative, Singular, Masculine Romans 14:20 1
ἔσθητε ésthēte Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Plural Luke 22:30 1
ἔσθοντες ésthontes Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Luke 10:7 1
Ἐσθιόντων Esthióntōn Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 26:26 1
ἤσθιεν ḗsthien Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular Mark 2:16 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2068, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word εσθιω appears 591 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 512 verses in 34 books.

591
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
512
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
34 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 34 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2068) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 512. 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 (G2068) 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.