καταφιλέω
to kiss
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-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
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- 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).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G2705 appears in the Book of Luke — 3 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 7:38 κατεφίλει impf act ind 3sg Standing behind at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and she wiped them with the hair of her head, kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.
- Luke 7:45 καταφιλοῦσά pres act ptcp nom sg fem You gave me no kiss, but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss my feet.
- Luke 15:20 κατεφίλησεν aor act ind 3sg "He arose, and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed 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.
The Greek verb καταφιλεω centers on the idea of “to kiss.” The word gravitates to Luke (50%), then Matthew and Mark. It appears 6 verses across 4 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. Debuting at Matthew 26:49, it then recurs through the corpus. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2705 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,476
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,476 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 83%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 4 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: Kissed 5×
- American Standard Version: Kissed 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Kissed 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He kissed 2×, Kissing 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2705 across 6 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 G2705 across 5 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 G2705 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear 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 G2705 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 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 kiss much, kiss again and again, kiss tenderly
Word origin
Origin: of Latin origin
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G2705 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| κατεφίλησεν katephílēsen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 26:49 | 3 |
| καταφιλοῦσά kataphiloûsá | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 7:45 | 1 |
| κατεφίλει katephílei | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 7:38 | 1 |
| κατεφίλουν katephíloun | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 20:37 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word καταφιλεω appears 14 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 14 verses in 7 books.
- 14
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 14
- 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
- Genesis 31:28 καταφιλέω
- Exodus 4:27 καταφιλέω
- Ruth 1:9 καταφιλέω
- 1 Samuel 20:41 καταφιλέω
- 2 Samuel 14:33 καταφιλέω
- 1 Kings 2:19 καταφιλέω
- Psalms 84:11 καταφιλέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2705) 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.
- Genesis 31:28 καταφιλέω and didn't allow me to kiss my sons and my daughters? Now have you done foolishly.
- Genesis 32:1 καταφιλέω Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.
- Genesis 45:15 καταφιλέω He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them. After that his brothers talked with him.
- Exodus 4:27 καταφιλέω Yahweh said to Aaron, "Go into the wilderness to meet Moses." He went, and met him on God's mountain, and kissed him.
- Ruth 1:9 καταφιλέω Yahweh grant you that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband. Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voice, and wept.
- Ruth 1:14 καταφιλέω They lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth joined with her.
- 1 Samuel 20:41 καταφιλέω As soon as the boy was gone, David arose out of [a place] toward the South, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.
- 2 Samuel 14:33 καταφιλέω So Joab came to the king, and told him; and when he had called for Absalom, he came to the king, and bowed himself on his face to the ground before the king: and the king kissed Absalom.
- 2 Samuel 15:5 καταφιλέω It was so, that when any man came near to do him obeisance, he put forth his hand, and took hold of him, and kissed him.
- 2 Samuel 19:40 καταφιλέω So the king went over to Gilgal, and Chimham went over with him: and all the people of Judah brought the king over, and also half the people of Israel.
- 2 Samuel 20:9 καταφιλέω Joab said to Amasa, Is it well with you, my brother? Joab took Amasa by the beard with his right hand to kiss him.
- 1 Kings 2:19 καταφιλέω Bathsheba therefore went to king Solomon, to speak to him for Adonijah. The king rose up to meet her, and bowed himself to her, and sat down on his throne, and caused a throne to be set for the king's mother; and she sat on his right hand.
- 1 Kings 19:20 καταφιλέω He left the oxen, and ran after Elijah, and said, Let me, I pray you, kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you. He said to him, Go back again; for what have I done to you?
- Psalms 84:11 καταφιλέω For Yahweh God is a sun and a shield. Yahweh will give grace and glory. He withholds no good thing from those who walk blamelessly.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2705) 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.
