μέλος
member
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Nominative-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).
- 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
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
4 distinct verses where G3196 appears in the Dative 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.
Romans 2 verses
- Romans 7:5 μέλεσιν n dat pl neut For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were through the law, worked in our members to bring forth fruit to death.
- Romans 7:23 μέλεσίν μέλεσίν n dat pl neut n dat pl neut but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.
James 2 verses
- James 3:6 μέλεσιν n dat pl neut And the tongue is a fire. The world of iniquity among our members is the tongue, which defiles the whole body, and sets on fire the course of nature, and is set on fire by Gehenna.
- James 4:1 μέλεσιν n dat pl neut Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don't they come from your pleasures that war in your members?
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.
μελος — transliterated mélos — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “member.” Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 5:29. It appears 24 verses across 6 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in 1 Corinthians. 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 G3196 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 →
- 24
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 24 distinct verses.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
- #424
- by frequency
- Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 424 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 24 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Corinthians 10 verses 42%
- Romans 6 verses 25%
- James 3 verses 13%
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 24 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 19 verses · 79%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 3 verses · 13%
- Gospels 2 verses · 8%
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: Members 29×, Member 5×
- American Standard Version: Members 25×, Member 5×, Of 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Members 8×, Parts 7×, Part 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Members 28×, Member 5×, Of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3196 across 34 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3196 across 34 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3196 across 30 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 4 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3196 across 37 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.
- a member, limb: a member of the human body
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain affinity
Of uncertain affinity; a limb or part of the body : - member.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G3196 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μέλη mélē | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Neuter | Romans 12:4 | 22 |
| μέλος mélos | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | 1 Corinthians 12:14 | 5 |
| μέλεσιν mélesin | Noun, Dative, Plural, Neuter | Romans 7:5 | 3 |
| μέλεσίν mélesín | Noun, Dative, Plural, Neuter | Romans 7:23 | 2 |
| μελῶν melō̂n | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter | Matthew 5:29 | 2 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μελος appears 11 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 10 verses in 6 books.
- 11
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 10
- 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
- Exodus 29:17 μέλος
- Leviticus 1:6 μέλος
- Judges 19:29 μέλος
- Job 9:28 μέλος
- Ezekiel 2:10 μέλος
- Micah 2:4 μέλος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3196) 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.
- Exodus 29:17 μέλος You shall cut the ram into its pieces, and wash its innards, and its legs, and put them with its pieces, and with its head.
- Leviticus 1:6 μέλος He shall flay the burnt offering, and cut it into pieces.
- Leviticus 1:12 μέλος He shall cut it into its pieces, with its head and its fat. The priest shall lay them in order on the wood that is on the fire which is on the altar,
- Leviticus 8:20 μέλος He cut the ram into its pieces; and Moses burned the head, and the pieces, and the fat.
- Leviticus 9:13 μέλος They delivered the burnt offering to him, piece by piece, and the head: and he burned them upon the altar.
- Judges 19:29 μέλος When he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the borders of Israel.
- Job 9:28 μέλος I am afraid of all my sorrows, I know that you will not hold me innocent.
- Ezekiel 2:10 μέλος He spread it before me: and it was written within and without; and there were written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.
- Ezekiel 24:6 μέλος Therefore thus says the Lord Yahweh: Woe to the bloody city, to the caldron whose rust is therein, and whose rust is not gone out of it! take out of it piece after piece; No lot is fallen on it.
- Micah 2:4 μέλος In that day they will take up a parable against you, And lament with a doleful lamentation, saying, 'We are utterly ruined! My people's possession is divided up. Indeed he takes it from me and assigns our fields to traitors!'"
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3196) 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.
