νοσφίζομαι
to embezzle
‘to embezzle’ is one of 3 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Middle
- The subject acts on or for itself, or with special interest in the action.
Mood
- 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.
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G3557 appears in the Book of Acts — 2 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.
Acts
- Acts 5:2 ἐνοσφίσατο aor mid ind 3sg and kept back part of the price, his wife also being aware of it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles' feet.
- Acts 5:3 νοσφίσασθαι aor mid inf But Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
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.
“to embezzle” is the headline sense of the Greek verb νοσφιζομαι (nosphízomai). With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Acts, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. Its earliest occurrence is Acts 5:2. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3557 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.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 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 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.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 67%
- Pauline corpus 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: Keep back 1×, Kept back 1×, Purloining 1×
- American Standard Version: Keep back 1×, Kept back 1×, Purloining 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He kept back 1×, Stealing 1×, Withhold 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He kept back 1×, Keep back 1×, Steal 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3557 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3557 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3557 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3557 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 3 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 set apart, separate, divide
- to set apart or separate for one's self
- to purloin, embezzle, withdraw covertly and appropriate to one's own use
Word origin
Origin: middle voice from nosphi (apart or clandestinely)
Middle voice from νοσφί nosphi ( apart or clandestinely ); to sequestrate for oneself that is embezzle : - keep back purloin.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G3557 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| νοσφίσασθαι nosphísasthai | Verb, Aorist, Middle, Infinitive | Acts 5:3 | 1 |
| νοσφιζομένους nosphizoménous | Verb, Present, Middle, Participle, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Titus 2:10 | 1 |
| ἐνοσφίσατο enosphísato | Verb, Aorist, Middle, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Acts 5:2 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word νοσφιζομαι appears 1 time in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1 verse in 1 book.
- 1
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 1
- verse
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Joshua 7:1 νοσφίζομαι
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3557) 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.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3557) 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.
