μοιχεύω
to commit adultery
‘to commit adultery’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
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).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms 9 distinct
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Singular 3 times (20%)
- Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular 3 times (20%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular 2 times (13%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (13%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Aorist, Passive, Infinitive 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (7%)
+1 more form (1 occurrence)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 15 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G3431 appears — 12 distinct verses across 7 books. 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 4 verses
- Matthew 5:27 μοιχεύσεις fut act ind 2sg "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery;'
- Matthew 5:28 ἐμοίχευσεν aor act ind 3sg but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.
- Matthew 5:32 μοιχευθῆναι aor pass inf but I tell you that whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries her when she is put away commits adultery.
- Matthew 19:18 μοιχεύσεις fut act ind 2sg He said to him, "Which ones?" Jesus said, "'You shall not murder.' 'You shall not commit adultery.' 'You shall not steal.' 'You shall not offer false testimony.'
Mark 1 verse
Luke 2 verses
- Luke 16:18 μοιχεύει μοιχεύει pres act ind 3sg pres act ind 3sg Everyone who divorces his wife, and marries another, commits adultery. He who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery.
- Luke 18:20 μοιχεύσῃς aor act subj 2sg You know the commandments: 'Don't commit adultery,' 'Don't murder,' 'Don't steal,' 'Don't give false testimony,' 'Honor your father and your mother.'"
John 1 verse
Romans 2 verses
- Romans 2:22 μοιχεύειν μοιχεύεις pres act inf pres act ind 2sg You who say a man shouldn't commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?
- Romans 13:9 μοιχεύσεις fut act ind 2sg For the commandments, "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not murder," "You shall not steal," "You shall not give false testimony," "You shall not covet," and whatever other commandments there are, are all summed up in this saying, namely, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
James 1 verse
Revelation 1 verse
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.
μοιχευω — transliterated moicheúō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to commit adultery.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “commit adultery” in the King James Version, “do not commit adultery” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It appears 12 verses across 7 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in Matthew. Thayer's distinguishes 4 senses for it. See the sense tree, 12-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3431 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 7 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 7 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 12 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 12 distinct verses.
- Gospels 8 verses · 67%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 17%
- Johannine 2 verses · 17%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 17%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 8%
- Revelation 1 verse · 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: Commit adultery 8×, Do 3×, Thou shalt 3×
- American Standard Version: Commit adultery 8×, Do 3×, Thou shalt 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Do not commit adultery 5×, Adultery 3×, Commit adultery 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Commit adultery 9×, Do 5×, Commits adultery 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3431 across 22 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3431 across 21 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3431 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 G3431 across 23 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 4 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.
- to be an adulterer
- to commit adultery with, have unlawful intercourse with another's wife
- of the wife: to suffer adultery, be debauched
- A Hebrew idiom…
Word origin
Derived from μοιχος (moichós) (G3432) — adulterer.
From G3432 ; to commit adultery : - commit adultery.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 9 distinct written forms G3431 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μοιχεύσεις moicheúseis | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular | Matthew 5:27 | 3 |
| μοιχεύσῃς moicheúsēs | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Singular | Mark 10:19 | 3 |
| μοιχεύει moicheúei | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 16:18 | 2 |
| μοιχεύεις moicheúeis | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular | Romans 2:22 | 2 |
| μοιχευθῆναι moicheuthē̂nai | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Infinitive | Matthew 5:32 | 1 |
| μοιχευομένη moicheuoménē | Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | John 8:4 | 1 |
| μοιχεύειν moicheúein | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Romans 2:22 | 1 |
| μοιχεύοντας moicheúontas | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Revelation 2:22 | 1 |
| ἐμοίχευσεν emoícheusen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 5:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3431, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μοιχευω appears 11 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 6 books.
- 11
- 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
- Exodus 20:13 μοιχεύω
- Leviticus 20:10 μοιχεύω
- Deuteronomy 5:17 μοιχεύω
- Jeremiah 3:9 μοιχεύω
- Ezekiel 23:43 μοιχεύω
- Hosea 4:13 μοιχεύω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3431) 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 20:13 μοιχεύω "You shall not murder.
- Leviticus 20:10 μοιχεύω "'The man who commits adultery with another man's wife, even he who commits adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
- Deuteronomy 5:17 μοιχεύω "You shall not murder.
- Jeremiah 3:9 μοιχεύω It happened through the lightness of her prostitution, that the land was polluted, and she committed adultery with stones and with stocks.
- Ezekiel 23:43 μοιχεύω Then said I of her who was old in adulteries, Now will they play the prostitute with her, and she [with them].
- Hosea 4:13 μοιχεύω They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains, And burn incense on the hills, under oaks and poplars and terebinths, Because its shade is good. Therefore your daughters play the prostitute, And your brides commit adultery.
- Hosea 4:14 μοιχεύω I will not punish your daughters when they play the prostitute, Nor your brides when they commit adultery; Because the men consort with prostitutes, And they sacrifice with the shrine prostitutes; And the people that does not understand will come to ruin.
- Hosea 7:4 μοιχεύω They are all adulterers. They are burning like an oven that the baker stops stirring, From the kneading of the dough, until it is leavened.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3431) 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.
