θαμβέω
to astonish
‘to astonish’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Imperfect-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
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Imperfect, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 2 times (67%)
- Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G2284 appears — 3 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Mark 3 verses
- Mark 1:27 ἐθαμβήθησαν aor pass ind 3pl They were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, "What is this? A new teaching? For with authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!"
- Mark 10:24 ἐθαμβοῦντο impf pass ind 3pl The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus answered again, "Children, how hard is it for those who trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God!
- Mark 10:32 ἐθαμβοῦντο impf pass ind 3pl They were on the way, going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus was going in front of them, and they were amazed; and those who followed were afraid. He again took the twelve, and began to tell them the things that were going to happen to him.
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.
θαμβεω (thambéō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to astonish.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. Mark dominates its distribution — 3 of 3 verses. It first appears in Mark 1:27. Its lexical range runs to 3 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2284 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,203
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,203 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Mark 3 verses 100%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Gospels 3 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: Amazed 1×, Astonished 1×, They were 1×
- American Standard Version: Amazed 1×, They were 1×, They were amazed 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Were amazed 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: They were amazed 1×, Were amazed 1×, Were astonished 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2284 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2284 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2284 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2284 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- to be astonished
- to be amazed
- to be frightened
Word origin
Derived from θαμβος (thámbos) (G2285) — amazement.
From G2285 ; to stupefy (with surprise) that is astound : - amaze astonish.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G2284 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐθαμβοῦντο ethamboûnto | Verb, Imperfect, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Mark 10:24 | 2 |
| ἐθαμβήθησαν ethambḗthēsan | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Mark 1:27 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2284, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word θαμβεω appears 3 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 3 verses in 3 books.
- 3
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 3
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- 1 Samuel 14:15 θαμβέω
- 2 Samuel 22:5 θαμβέω
- 2 Kings 7:15 θαμβέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2284) 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.
- 1 Samuel 14:15 θαμβέω There was a trembling in the camp, in the field, and among all the people; the garrison, and the spoilers, they also trembled; and the earth quaked: so there was an exceeding great trembling.
- 2 Samuel 22:5 θαμβέω For the waves of death compassed me; The floods of ungodliness made me afraid:
- 2 Kings 7:15 θαμβέω They went after them to the Jordan: and, behold, all the way was full of garments and vessels, which the Syrians had cast away in their haste. The messengers returned, and told the king.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2284) 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.
