ἀλώπηξ
fox
‘fox’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G258 appears in the Book of Luke — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Luke
- Luke 9:58 ἀλώπεκες n nom pl fem Jesus said to him, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
- Luke 13:32 ἀλώπεκι n dat sg fem He said to them, "Go and tell that fox, 'Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I complete my mission.
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.
At its core, αλωπηξ (alṓpēx) means “fox.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Luke (67% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Matthew 8:20. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G258 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.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 67%
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: Foxes 2×
- American Standard Version: Foxes 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Foxes 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Foxes 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G258 across 3 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 G258 across 3 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 G258 across 3 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G258 across 3 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 2 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.
- a fox
- metaph. a sly or crafty man
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain derivation
Of uncertain derivation; a fox that is (figuratively) a cunning person : - fox
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G258 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀλώπεκες alṓpekes | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | Matthew 8:20 | 2 |
| ἀλώπεκι alṓpeki | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 13:32 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αλωπηξ appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 7 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 8
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 1:35 ἀλώπηξ
- 1 Kings 21:10 ἀλώπηξ
- Ezra 13:35 ἀλώπηξ
- Psalms 62:11 ἀλώπηξ
- Song of Solomon 2:15 ἀλώπηξ
- Lamentations 5:18 ἀλώπηξ
- Ezekiel 13:4 ἀλώπηξ
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G258) 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.
- Judges 1:35 ἀλώπηξ but the Amorites would dwell in Mount Heres, in Aijalon, and in Shaalbim: yet the hand of the house of Joseph prevailed, so that they became subject to forced labor.
- Judges 15:4 ἀλώπηξ Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between every two tails.
- 1 Kings 21:10 ἀλώπηξ and set two men, base fellows, before him, and let them testify against him, saying, You did curse God and the king. Then carry him out, and stone him to death.
- Ezra 13:35 ἀλώπηξ
- Psalms 62:11 ἀλώπηξ God has spoken once, Twice I have heard this, That power belongs to God.
- Song of Solomon 2:15 ἀλώπηξ Catch for us the foxes, The little foxes that spoil the vineyards; For our vineyards are in blossom. Beloved
- Lamentations 5:18 ἀλώπηξ For the mountain of Zion, which is desolate: The foxes walk on it.
- Ezekiel 13:4 ἀλώπηξ Israel, your prophets have been like foxes in the waste places.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G258) 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.
