πενθερά
mother-in-law
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.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
3 distinct verses where G3994 appears in the Nominative 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.
Mark 1 verse
Luke 2 verses
- Luke 4:38 πενθερὰ n nom sg fem He rose up from the synagogue, and entered into Simon's house. Simon's mother-in-law was afflicted with a great fever, and they begged him for her.
- Luke 12:53 πενθερὰ πενθεράν n nom sg fem n acc sg fem They will be divided, father against son, and son against father; mother against daughter, and daughter against her mother; mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."
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.
“mother-in-law” is the headline sense of the Greek noun πενθερα (pentherá). With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in Matthew. Scripture first uses it in Matthew 8:14. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3994 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,476
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,476 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 40%
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: Mother in law 3×, Wife's mother 3×
- American Standard Version: 's wife 2×, Daughter in law 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Mother-in-law 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Mother in law 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3994 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3994 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 G3994 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3994 across 6 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.
- mother-in-law, a wife's mother
Word origin
Derived from πενθερος (pentherós) (G3995) — father-in-law.
Feminine of G3995 ; a wife's mother : - mother in law wife´ s mother.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G3994 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| πενθερὰ pentherà | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Mark 1:30 | 3 |
| πενθεράν pentherán | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 12:53 | 1 |
| πενθερὰν pentheràn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Matthew 8:14 | 1 |
| πενθερᾶς pentherâs | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Matthew 10:35 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πενθερα appears 13 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 12 verses in 3 books.
- 13
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 12
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Deuteronomy 27:23 πενθερά
- Ruth 1:14 πενθερά
- Micah 7:6 πενθερά
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3994) 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.
- Deuteronomy 27:23 πενθερά Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law. All the people shall say, Amen.
- Ruth 1:14 πενθερά They lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth joined with her.
- Ruth 2:11 πενθερά Boaz answered her, It has fully been shown me, all that you have done to your mother-in-law since the death of your husband; and how you have left your father and your mother, and the land of your birth, and have come to a people that you didn't know before.
- Ruth 2:18 πενθερά She took it up, and went into the city; and her mother-in-law saw what she had gleaned: and she brought forth and gave to her that which she had left after she was sufficed.
- Ruth 2:19 πενθερά Her mother-in-law said to her, Where have you gleaned today? and where have you worked? blessed be he who did take knowledge of you. She shown her mother-in-law with whom she had worked, and said, The man's name with whom I worked today is Boaz.
- Ruth 2:21 πενθερά Ruth the Moabitess said, Yes, he said to me, You shall keep fast by my young men, until they have ended all my harvest.
- Ruth 2:23 πενθερά So she kept fast by the maidens of Boaz, to glean to the end of barley harvest and of wheat harvest; and she lived with her mother-in-law.
- Ruth 3:1 πενθερά Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, My daughter, shall I not seek rest for you, that it may be well with you?
- Ruth 3:6 πενθερά She went down to the threshing floor, and did according to all that her mother-in-law bade her.
- Ruth 3:16 πενθερά When she came to her mother-in-law, she said, Who are you, my daughter? She told her all that the man had done to her.
- Ruth 3:17 πενθερά She said, These six [measures] of barley gave he me; for he said, "Don't go empty to your mother-in-law."
- Micah 7:6 πενθερά For the son dishonors the father, The daughter rises up against her mother, The daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; A man's enemies are the men of his own house.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3994) 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.
