πλεονεξία
covetousness
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Dative-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
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
3 distinct verses where G4124 appears in the Dative case, across 3 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.
Romans 1 verse
Ephesians 1 verse
2 Peter 1 verse
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.
At its core, πλεονεξια (pleonexía) means “covetousness.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “covetousness” in the King James Version, “greed” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It turns up in 10 verses across 8 books, an uncommon footprint. Scripture first uses it in Mark 7:22. It shares a root with πλεονεκτης and πλεονεκτεω. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4124 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 8 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 8 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,056
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,056 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 10 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 10 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 6 verses · 60%
- Gospels 2 verses · 20%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 20%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 10%
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: Covetousness 8×
- American Standard Version: Covetousness 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Greed 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Covetousness 3×, Greed 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4124 across 10 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 G4124 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 G4124 across 10 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4124 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- greedy desire to have more, covetousness, avarice
Word origin
Derived from πλεονεκτης (pleonéktēs) (G4123) — covetous.
From G4123 ; avarice that is (by implication) fraudulency extortion : - covetous (-ness) practices greediness.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G4124 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| πλεονεξίας pleonexías | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Luke 12:15 | 3 |
| πλεονεξίᾳ pleonexía | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | Romans 1:29 | 3 |
| πλεονεξίαν pleonexían | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | 2 Corinthians 9:5 | 2 |
| πλεονεξία pleonexía | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Ephesians 5:3 | 1 |
| πλεονεξίαι pleonexíai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | Mark 7:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4124, 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
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πλεονεξια appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 5 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Psalms 118:36 πλεονεξία
- Isaiah 28:8 πλεονεξία
- Jeremiah 22:17 πλεονεξία
- Ezekiel 22:27 πλεονεξία
- Habakkuk 2:9 πλεονεξία
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4124) 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.
- Psalms 118:36 πλεονεξία
- Isaiah 28:8 πλεονεξία For all tables are full of vomit [and] filthiness, [so that there is] no place [clean].
- Jeremiah 22:17 πλεονεξία But your eyes and your heart are not but for your covetousness, and for shedding innocent blood, and for oppression, and for violence, to do it.
- Ezekiel 22:27 πλεονεξία Her princes in the midst of it are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, [and] to destroy souls, that they may get dishonest gain.
- Habakkuk 2:9 πλεονεξία Woe to him who gets an evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the hand of evil!
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4124) 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.
