ἀγάπη
love
also: brotherly love, affection, good will, benevolence fuller range ↓
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G26 appears in the Book of 2 Peter — 1 distinct verse. 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.
2 Peter
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.
αγαπη — transliterated agápē — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “love.” “charity” is the historic King James Version rendering; modern versions use “love.” See the renderings breakdown. The Greek New Testament uses it across 106 verses — common. Debuting at Matthew 24:12, it then recurs through the corpus. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses; alongside “love” it spans “brotherly love”, “affection”, and “good will”. See the sense tree, 106-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G26 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 →
- 106
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 106 distinct verses.
- 24 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 24 of 27 New Testament books.
- #143
- by frequency
- Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 143 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 106 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 John 14 verses 13%
- 1 Corinthians 11 verses 10%
- Ephesians 10 verses 9%
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 106 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 71 verses · 67%
- Johannine 25 verses · 24%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 23 verses · 22%
- Gospels 8 verses · 8%
- Hebrews 2 verses · 2%
- Revelation 2 verses · 2%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 1%
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: Love 84×, Charity 24×
- American Standard Version: Love 106×
- Berean Standard Bible: Love 111×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Love 112×, Of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G26 across 116 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 G26 across 115 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 G26 across 115 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G26 across 120 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 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.
- brotherly love, affection, good will, love, benevolence
- love feasts
Word origin
Derived from αγαπαω (agapáō) (G25) — to love.
From G25 ; love that is affection or benevolence ; specifically (plural) a love feast : - (feast of) charity ([-ably]) dear love.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G26 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀγάπη agápē | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Matthew 24:12 | 36 |
| ἀγάπην agápēn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 11:42 | 33 |
| ἀγάπῃ agápē | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | John 15:9 | 28 |
| ἀγάπης agápēs | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Romans 8:35 | 18 |
| ἀγάπαις agápais | Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine | Jude 1:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G26, 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 αγαπη appears 15 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 14 verses in 4 books.
- 15
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 14
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- 2 Samuel 13:15 ἀγάπη
- Ecclesiastes 9:1 ἀγάπη
- Song of Solomon 2:4 ἀγάπη
- Jeremiah 2:2 ἀγάπη
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G26) 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.
- 2 Samuel 13:15 ἀγάπη Then Amnon hated her with exceeding great hatred; for the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. Amnon said to her, Arise, be gone.
- Ecclesiastes 9:1 ἀγάπη For all this I laid to my heart, even to explore all this: that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hatred, man doesn't know it; all is before them.
- Ecclesiastes 9:6 ἀγάπη Also their love, their hatred, and their envy has perished long ago; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun.
- Song of Solomon 2:4 ἀγάπη He brought me to the banquet hall. His banner over me is love.
- Song of Solomon 2:5 ἀγάπη Strengthen me with raisins, Refresh me with apples; For I am faint with love.
- Song of Solomon 2:7 ἀγάπη I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, or by the hinds of the field, That you not stir up, nor awaken love, Until it so desires.
- Song of Solomon 3:5 ἀγάπη I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, or by the hinds of the field, That you not stir up, nor awaken love, Until it so desires.
- Song of Solomon 3:10 ἀγάπη He made its pillars of silver, Its bottom of gold, its seat of purple, Its midst being paved with love, From the daughters of Jerusalem.
- Song of Solomon 5:8 ἀγάπη I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, If you find my beloved, That you tell him that I am faint with love. Friends
- Song of Solomon 7:7 ἀγάπη This, your stature, is like a palm tree, Your breasts like its fruit.
- Song of Solomon 8:4 ἀγάπη I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, That you not stir up, nor awaken love, Until it so desires. Friends
- Song of Solomon 8:6 ἀγάπη Set me as a seal on your heart, As a seal on your arm; For love is strong as death. Jealousy is as cruel as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, A very flame of Yahweh.
- Song of Solomon 8:7 ἀγάπη Many waters can't quench love, Neither can floods drown it. If a man would give all the wealth of his house for love, He would be utterly scorned. Friends
- Jeremiah 2:2 ἀγάπη Go, and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus says Yahweh, I remember for you the kindness of your youth, the love of your weddings; how you went after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G26) 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.
