οστεον
bone
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
- 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).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G3747 appears in the Book of John — 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.
John
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.
“bone” is the headline sense of the Greek noun οστεον (ostéon). It is rare — just 4 verses in the entire Greek New Testament. It concentrates in Matthew, which alone accounts for 25% of its uses. First canonically at Matthew 23:27, it enters the text early. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3747 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 3 verses · 75%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 25%
- Johannine 1 verse · 25%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 25%
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: Bones 3×
- American Standard Version: Bones 2×, Of 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bones 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bones 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3747 across 5 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3747 across 6 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 G3747 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3747 across 4 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 bone
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain affinity
Of uncertain affinity; a bone : - bone.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G3747 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ὀστέων ostéōn | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter | Matthew 23:27 | 2 |
| ὀστέα ostéa | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter | Luke 24:39 | 1 |
| ὀστοῦν ostoûn | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | John 19:36 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word οστεον appears 109 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 90 verses in 23 books.
- 109
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 90
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 23 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 23 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 2:23 ὀστέον
- Exodus 12:10 ὀστέον
- Numbers 9:12 ὀστέον
- Joshua 24:32 ὀστέον
- Judges 9:2 ὀστέον
- 1 Samuel 31:13 ὀστέον
- 2 Samuel 5:1 ὀστέον
- 1 Kings 13:2 ὀστέον
- 2 Kings 13:21 ὀστέον
- 1 Chronicles 10:12 ὀστέον
- 2 Chronicles 34:5 ὀστέον
- Job 2:5 ὀστέον
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3747) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 90. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.
- Genesis 2:23 ὀστέον The man said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
- Genesis 29:14 ὀστέον Laban said to him, Surely you are my bone and my flesh. He lived with him for a month.
- Genesis 50:25 ὀστέον Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, "God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here."
- Exodus 12:10 ὀστέον You shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; but that which remains of it until the morning you shall burn with fire.
- Exodus 12:46 ὀστέον In one house shall it be eaten; you shall not carry forth anything of the flesh abroad out of the house; neither shall you break a bone of it.
- Exodus 13:19 ὀστέον Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had made the children of Israel swear, saying, "God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones away from here with you."
- Numbers 9:12 ὀστέον They shall leave none of it until the morning, nor break a bone of it. According to all the statute of the Passover they shall keep it.
- Numbers 19:16 ὀστέον Whoever in the open field touches one who is slain with a sword, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days.
- Numbers 19:18 ὀστέον and a clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it on the tent, and on all the vessels, and on the persons who were there, and on him who touched the bone, or the slain, or the dead, or the grave:
- Joshua 24:32 ὀστέον The bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in the parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of money: and they became the inheritance of the children of Joseph.
- Judges 9:2 ὀστέον Please speak in the ears of all the men of Shechem, Whether is better for you, that all the sons of Jerubbaal, who are seventy persons, rule over you, or that one rule over you? Remember also that I am your bone and your flesh.
- 1 Samuel 31:13 ὀστέον They took their bones, and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh, and fasted seven days.
- 2 Samuel 5:1 ὀστέον Then came all the tribes of Israel to David to Hebron, and spoke, saying, Behold, we are your bone and your flesh.
- 2 Samuel 19:13 ὀστέον Say you to Amasa, Aren't you my bone and my flesh? God do so to me, and more also, if you aren't captain of the host before me continually in the room of Joab.
- 2 Samuel 19:14 ὀστέον He bowed the heart of all the men of Judah, even as [the heart of] one man; so that they sent to the king, [saying], Return you, and all your servants.
- 2 Samuel 21:12 ὀστέον David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from the men of Jabesh Gilead, who had stolen them from the street of Beth-shan, where the Philistines had hanged them, in the day that the Philistines killed Saul in Gilboa;
- 2 Samuel 21:13 ὀστέον and he brought up from there the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son: and they gathered the bones of those who were hanged.
- 2 Samuel 21:14 ὀστέον They buried the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son in the country of Benjamin in Zela, in the tomb of Kish his father: and they performed all that the king commanded. After that God was entreated for the land.
- 1 Kings 13:2 ὀστέον He cried against the altar by the word of Yahweh, and said, altar, altar, thus says Yahweh: Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name; and on you shall he sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense on you, and men's bones shall they burn on you.
- 1 Kings 13:31 ὀστέον It happened, after he had buried him, that he spoke to his sons, saying, When I am dead, then bury me in the tomb in which the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones.
- 2 Kings 13:21 ὀστέον It happened, as they were burying a man, that behold, they spied a band; and they cast the man into the tomb of Elisha: and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet.
- 2 Kings 23:14 ὀστέον He broke in pieces the pillars, and cut down the Asherim, and filled their places with the bones of men.
- 2 Kings 23:16 ὀστέον As Josiah turned himself, he spied the tombs that were there in the mountain; and he sent, and took the bones out of the tombs, and burned them on the altar, and defiled it, according to the word of Yahweh which the man of God proclaimed, who proclaimed these things.
- 2 Kings 23:18 ὀστέον He said, Let him be; let no man move his bones. So they let his bones alone, with the bones of the prophet who came out of Samaria.
- 2 Kings 23:20 ὀστέον He killed all the priests of the high places that were there, on the altars, and burned men's bones on them; and he returned to Jerusalem.
- 1 Chronicles 10:12 ὀστέον all the valiant men arose, and took away the body of Saul, and the bodies of his sons, and brought them to Jabesh, and buried their bones under the oak in Jabesh, and fasted seven days.
- 1 Chronicles 11:1 ὀστέον Then all Israel gathered themselves to David to Hebron, saying, Behold, we are your bone and your flesh.
- 2 Chronicles 34:5 ὀστέον He burnt the bones of the priests on their altars, and purged Judah and Jerusalem.
- Job 2:5 ὀστέον But put forth your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce you to your face."
- Job 4:14 ὀστέον Fear came on me, and trembling, Which made all my bones shake.
- Job 7:15 ὀστέον So that my soul chooses strangling, Death rather than my bones.
- Job 10:11 ὀστέον You have clothed me with skin and flesh, And knit me together with bones and sinews.
- Job 19:20 ὀστέον My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh. I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.
- Job 20:11 ὀστέον His bones are full of his youth, But youth shall lie down with him in the dust.
- Job 30:17 ὀστέον In the night season my bones are pierced in me, And the pains that gnaw me take no rest.
- Job 30:30 ὀστέον My skin grows black and peels from me. My bones are burned with heat.
- Job 33:19 ὀστέον He is chastened also with pain on his bed, With continual strife in his bones;
- Job 33:21 ὀστέον His flesh is so consumed away, that it can't be seen; His bones that were not seen stick out.
- Job 33:24 ὀστέον Then God is gracious to him, and says, 'Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom.'
- Psalms 6:3 ὀστέον My soul is also in great anguish. But you, Yahweh--how long?
- Psalms 21:15 ὀστέον
- Psalms 21:18 ὀστέον
- Psalms 30:11 ὀστέον You have turned my mourning into dancing for me. You have removed my sackcloth, and clothed me with gladness,
- Psalms 31:3 ὀστέον For you are my rock and my fortress, Therefore for your name's sake lead me and guide me.
- Psalms 33:21 ὀστέον For our heart rejoices in him, Because we have trusted in his holy name.
- Psalms 34:10 ὀστέον The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger, But those who seek Yahweh shall not lack any good thing.
- Psalms 37:4 ὀστέον Also delight yourself in Yahweh, And he will give you the desires of your heart.
- Psalms 41:11 ὀστέον By this I know that you delight in me, Because my enemy doesn't triumph over me.
- Psalms 50:10 ὀστέον For every animal of the forest is mine, And the cattle on a thousand hills.
- Psalms 52:6 ὀστέον The righteous also will see it, and fear, And laugh at him, saying,
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3747) 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.
