καθαίρω
to cleanse
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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs 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
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G2508 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
John 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.
καθαιρω (kathaírō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to cleanse.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Greek New Testament. It clusters heavily in John, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. A true hapax — its single appearance is John 15:2. It clusters with καθαρος, καθαριζω and καθαροτης under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2508 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #3,503
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- John 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Gospels 1 verse · 100%
- Johannine 1 verse · 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: He purgeth 1×, Purged 1×
- American Standard Version: Cleansed 1×, He cleanseth 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He prunes 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He prunes 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2508 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2508 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2508 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2508 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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 cleanse, of filth impurity, etc
Word origin
Derived from καθαρος (katharós) (G2513) — clean.
From G2513 ; to cleanse that is (specifically) to prune ; figuratively to expiate : - purge.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2508, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word καθαιρω appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 6 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 8
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Deuteronomy 18:10 κατααἴρω
- Joshua 5:4 κατααἴρω
- 2 Samuel 4:6 καθαίρω
- Job 7:9 κατααἴρω
- Proverbs 15:27 κατααἴρω
- Isaiah 28:27 κατααἴρω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2508) 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.
- Deuteronomy 18:10 κατααἴρω There shall not be found with you anyone who makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices sorcery, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer,
- Deuteronomy 26:13 κατααἴρω You shall say before Yahweh your God, I have put away the holy things out of my house, and also have given them to the Levite, and to the foreigner, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all your commandment which you have commanded me: I have not transgressed any of your commandments, neither have I forgotten them:
- Joshua 5:4 κατααἴρω This is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: all the people who came forth out of Egypt, who were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came forth out of Egypt.
- 2 Samuel 4:6 καθαίρω They came there into the midst of the house, as though they would have fetched wheat; and they struck him in the body: and Rechab and Baanah his brother escaped.
- Job 7:9 κατααἴρω As the cloud is consumed and vanishes away, So he who goes down to Sheol shall come up no more.
- Job 9:30 κατααἴρω If I wash myself with snow, And cleanse my hands with lye,
- Proverbs 15:27 κατααἴρω He who is greedy for gain troubles his own house, But he who hates bribes will live.
- Isaiah 28:27 κατααἴρω For the dill are not threshed with a sharp [threshing] instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned about on the cumin; but the dill are beaten out with a staff, and the cumin with a rod.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2508) 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.
