λῃστης
robber
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-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
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- 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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
5 distinct verses where G3027 appears in the Nominative case, across 2 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Matthew 2 verses
John 3 verses
- John 10:1 λῃστής n nom sg masc "Most assuredly, I tell you, one who doesn't enter by the door into the sheep fold, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
- John 10:8 λῃσταί n nom pl masc All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep didn't listen to them.
- John 18:40 λῃστής n nom sg masc Then they all shouted again, saying, "Not this man, but Barabbas!" Now Barabbas was a robber.
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 ληστης centers on the idea of “robber.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “thieves” in the King James Version, “robbers” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It appears 15 verses across 5 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. The word gravitates to Matthew (27%), then Luke and Mark. Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 21:13. Dig into 15-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3027 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 →
- 15
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 15 distinct verses.
- 5 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 5 of 27 New Testament books.
- #768
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 768 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 15 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 15 distinct verses.
- Gospels 14 verses · 93%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 4 verses · 27%
- Johannine 3 verses · 20%
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 7%
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: Thieves 8×, Thief 3×, Robber 2×
- American Standard Version: Robbers 9×, Robber 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Robbers 9×, Outlaw 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Robbers 9×, Robber 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3027 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3027 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3027 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G3027 across 15 tagged occurrences — 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.
- a robber, plunderer, freebooter, brigand
Word origin
Origin: from leizomai (to plunder)
From ληΐ́ζομαι lē izomai (to plunder); a brigand : - robber thief.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms G3027 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| λῃστῶν lēstō̂n | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 21:13 | 4 |
| λῃστὴν lēstḕn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 26:55 | 3 |
| λῃστάς lēstás | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Mark 15:27 | 2 |
| λῃστής lēstḗs | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | John 10:1 | 2 |
| λῃσταί lēstaí | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 27:38 | 2 |
| λῃσταὶ lēstaì | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 27:44 | 1 |
| λῃσταῖς lēstaîs | Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 10:30 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ληστης appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 4 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- 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
- Jeremiah 7:11 λῃστής
- Ezekiel 22:9 λῃστής
- Hosea 7:1 λῃστής
- Obadiah 1:5 λῃστής
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3027) 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.
- Jeremiah 7:11 λῃστής Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I, even I, have seen it, says Yahweh.
- Jeremiah 18:22 λῃστής Let a cry be heard from their houses, when you shall bring a troop suddenly on them; for they have dug a pit to take me, and hid snares for my feet.
- Ezekiel 22:9 λῃστής Slanderous men have been in you to shed blood; and in you they have eaten on the mountains: in the midst of you they have committed lewdness.
- Hosea 7:1 λῃστής When I would heal Israel, Then the iniquity of Ephraim is uncovered, Also the wickedness of Samaria; For they commit falsehood, And the thief enters in, And the gang of robbers ravages outside.
- Obadiah 1:5 λῃστής If thieves came to you, if robbers by night-- oh, what disaster awaits you--wouldn't they only steal until they had enough? If grape pickers came to you, wouldn't they leave some gleaning grapes?
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3027) 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.
