ἅλυσις
chain
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Dative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine 4 times (36%)
- Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine 3 times (27%)
- Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine 2 times (18%)
- Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine 1 time (9%)
- Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine 1 time (9%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 11 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G254 appears — 10 distinct verses across 6 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.
Mark 2 verses
- Mark 5:3 ἁλύσει n dat sg fem who had his dwelling in the tombs. Nobody could bind him any more, not even with chains,
- Mark 5:4 ἁλύσεσιν ἁλύσεις n dat pl fem n acc pl fem because he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been torn apart by him, and the fetters broken in pieces. Nobody had the strength to tame him.
Luke 1 verse
Acts 4 verses
- Acts 12:6 ἁλύσεσιν n dat pl fem The same night when Herod was about to bring him out, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains. Guards in front of the door kept the prison.
- Acts 12:7 ἁλύσεις n nom pl fem And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side, and woke him up, saying, "Stand up quickly!" His chains fell off from his hands.
- Acts 21:33 ἁλύσεσι n dat pl fem Then the commanding officer came near, arrested him, commanded him to be bound with two chains, and inquired who he was and what he had done.
- Acts 28:20 ἅλυσιν n acc sg fem For this cause therefore I asked to see you and to speak with you. For because of the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain."
Ephesians 1 verse
2 Timothy 1 verse
Revelation 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.
The Greek noun αλυσις centers on the idea of “chain.” First canonically at Mark 5:3, it enters the text early. It turns up in 10 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Acts (40%), then Mark and Luke. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G254 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
- #978
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 978 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 10 occurrences in the concordance →
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 10 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 5 verses · 50%
- Gospels 3 verses · 30%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 20%
- Johannine 1 verse · 10%
- Revelation 1 verse · 10%
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: Chains 7×, Chain 3×
- American Standard Version: Chains 5×, Chain 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Chains 9×, Chain 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Chains 7×, Chain 4×, With 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G254 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G254 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G254 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G254 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- a chain, bond by which the body or any part of it (hands, feet) is bound
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain derivation
Of uncertain derivation; a fetter or manacle : - bonds chain.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G254 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἁλύσεσιν halýsesin | Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine | Mark 5:4 | 3 |
| ἁλύσεις halýseis | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine | Mark 5:4 | 2 |
| ἁλύσει halýsei | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | Mark 5:3 | 2 |
| ἅλυσιν hálysin | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Acts 28:20 | 2 |
| ἁλύσεσι halýsesi | Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine | Acts 21:33 | 1 |
| ἅλυσίν hálysín | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | 2 Timothy 1:16 | 1 |
