μέθη
drunkenness
‘drunkenness’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G3178 appears in the Book of Luke — 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.
Luke
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.
μεθη — transliterated méthē — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “drunkenness.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. More than a third of its appearances fall in Luke. Its earliest occurrence is Luke 21:34. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. 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 G3178 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.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 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 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 3 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 67%
- Gospels 1 verse · 33%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 33%
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: Drunkenness 3×
- American Standard Version: Drunkenness 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Drunkenness 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Drunkenness 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3178 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3178 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3178 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3178 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- intoxication
- drunkenness
Word origin
Origin: apparently a root word
Apparently a primary word; an intoxicant that is (by implication) intoxication : - drunkenness.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G3178 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μέθαι méthai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | Galatians 5:21 | 1 |
| μέθαις méthais | Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine | Romans 13:13 | 1 |
| μέθῃ méthē | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 21:34 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3178, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μεθη appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 6 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 8
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Proverbs 20:1 μέθη
- Isaiah 28:7 μέθη
- Jeremiah 28:57 μέθη
- Ezekiel 23:33 μέθη
- Joel 1:5 μέθη
- Haggai 1:6 μέθη
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3178) 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.
- Proverbs 20:1 μέθη Wine is a mocker, and beer is a brawler; Whoever is led astray by them is not wise.
- Proverbs 31:6 μέθη Give strong drink to him who is ready to perish; And wine to the bitter in soul:
- Isaiah 28:7 μέθη Even these reel with wine, and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment.
- Jeremiah 28:57 μέθη
- Ezekiel 23:33 μέθη You shall be filled with drunkenness and sorrow, with the cup of astonishment and desolation, with the cup of your sister Samaria.
- Ezekiel 39:19 μέθη You shall eat fat until you be full, and drink blood until you be drunken, of my sacrifice which I have sacrificed for you.
- Joel 1:5 μέθη Wake up, you drunkards, and weep! Wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine; For it is cut off from your mouth.
- Haggai 1:6 μέθη You have sown much, and bring in little. You eat, but you don't have enough. You drink, but you aren't filled with drink. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm, and he who earns wages earns wages to put them into a bag with holes in it."
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3178) 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.
