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πέτρα

rock

‘rock’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

G4073 Strong's Greek
pétra Transliteration
/pet'-ra/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 15 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

The Greek noun πετρα centers on the idea of “rock.” Debuting at Matthew 7:24, it then recurs through the corpus. Spanning 14 verses in 7 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. Matthew dominates its distribution — 5 of 14 verses. Thayer's distinguishes 3 senses for it. Dig into 14-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
rock
Modern gloss
rock
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G4073 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 →

14
distinct verses
The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
7 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 7:24
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 7:24.
Revelation 6:16
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 6:16.
#768
by frequency
Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 768 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 14 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 9 · 64%
  • Acts 0 · 0%
  • Pauline Epistles 2 · 14%
  • General Epistles 1 · 7%
  • Revelation 2 · 14%

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 14 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 9 verses · 64%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 21%
  • Johannine 2 verses · 14%
  • Pauline corpus 2 verses · 14%
  • Revelation 2 verses · 14%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 7%

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: Rock 13×, Rocks 3×
  • American Standard Version: Rock 12×, Rocks 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Rock 10×, Rocks 3×, Rocky ground 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Rock 12×, Rocks 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4073 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Rock” 13×
  • “Rocks” 3×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G4073 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Rock” 12×
  • “Rocks” 3×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G4073 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Rock” 10×
  • “Rocks” 3×
  • “Rocky ground” 2×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G4073 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Rock” 12×
  • “Rocks” 3×

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.

  1. a projecting rock, crag, rocky ground
  2. a rock, a large stone
  3. metaph. a man like a rock, by reason of his firmness and strength of soul

Word origin

Derived from Πετρος (Pétros) (G4074) — Peter.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TDNT: 07:35,8

Feminine of the same as G4074 ; a (mass of) rock (literally or figuratively): - rock.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 6 distinct written forms G4073 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
πέτραν pétran Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 7:24 6
πέτρας pétras Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Mark 15:46 3
πέτρα pétra Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine 1 Corinthians 10:4 2
πέτρᾳ pétra Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 16:18 2
πέτραι pétrai Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine Matthew 27:51 1
πέτραις pétrais Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine Revelation 6:16 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4073, 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

Derived from this word

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word πετρα appears 85 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 76 verses in 22 books.

85
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
76
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
22 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 22 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4073) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 76. 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 (G4073) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.