πατριάρχης
patriarch
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-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
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where G3966 appears in the Genitive case in the Book of Acts. 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.
Acts
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.
πατριαρχης (patriárchēs) is a Greek noun most often rendered “patriarch.” It occurs a mere 4 verses across Scripture. Acts dominates its distribution — 3 of 4 verses. It first appears in Acts 2:29. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3966 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.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 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 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.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 75%
- 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: Patriarch 2×, Patriarchs 2×
- American Standard Version: Patriarch 2×, Patriarchs 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Patriarch 2×, Patriarchs 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Patriarch 2×, Patriarchs 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3966 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3966 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3966 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3966 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.
- patriarch, founder of a tribe, progenitor
Word origin
Derived from πατρια (patriá) (G3965) — family.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G3966 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| πατριάρχαι patriárchai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 7:9 | 1 |
| πατριάρχας patriárchas | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 7:8 | 1 |
| πατριάρχης patriárchēs | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Hebrews 7:4 | 1 |
| πατριάρχου patriárchou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | Acts 2:29 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πατριαρχης appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 2 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- 1 Chronicles 24:31 πατριάρχης
- 2 Chronicles 19:8 πατριάρχης
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3966) 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.
- 1 Chronicles 24:31 πατριάρχης These likewise cast lots even as their brothers the sons of Aaron in the presence of David the king, and Zadok, and Ahimelech, and the heads of the fathers' [houses] of the priests and of the Levites; the fathers' [houses] of the chief even as those of his younger brother.
- 1 Chronicles 27:22 πατριάρχης of Dan, Azarel the son of Jeroham. These were the captains of the tribes of Israel.
- 2 Chronicles 19:8 πατριάρχης Moreover in Jerusalem did Jehoshaphat set of the Levites and the priests, and of the heads of the fathers' [houses] of Israel, for the judgment of Yahweh, and for controversies. They returned to Jerusalem.
- 2 Chronicles 23:20 πατριάρχης He took the captains of hundreds, and the nobles, and the governors of the people, and all the people of the land, and brought down the king from the house of Yahweh: and they came through the upper gate to the king's house, and set the king on the throne of the kingdom.
- 2 Chronicles 26:12 πατριάρχης The whole number of the heads of fathers' [houses], even the mighty men of valor, was two thousand and six hundred.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3966) 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.
