σαρκικός
carnal
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- 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.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G4559 appears in the Book of 1 Corinthians — 2 distinct verses. 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.
1 Corinthians
- 1 Corinthians 3:3 σαρκικοί σαρκικοί adj nom pl masc adj nom pl masc for you are still fleshly. For insofar as there is jealousy, strife, and factions among you, aren't you fleshly, and don't you walk in the ways of men?
- 1 Corinthians 9:11 σαρκικὰ adj acc pl neut If we sowed to you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we reap your fleshly things?
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.
“carnal” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective σαρκικος (sarkikós). Older and newer Bibles part ways — “carnal” in the King James Version, “fleshly” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It appears 6 verses across 4 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in 1 Corinthians. Scripture first uses it in Romans 15:27. See the sense tree, 6-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4559 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,358
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,358 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Corinthians 2 verses 33%
- 2 Corinthians 2 verses 33%
- Romans 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 83%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 17%
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: Carnal 7×, Carnal things 2×, Fleshly 2×
- American Standard Version: Carnal 5×, Fleshly 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Worldly 3×, Flesh 2×, Material 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Fleshly 5×, Material things 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4559 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4559 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G4559 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4559 across 7 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.
- fleshly, carnal
Word origin
Derived from σαρξ (sárx) (G4561) — flesh.
From G4561 ; pertaining to flesh that is (by extension) bodily temporal or (by implication) animal unregenerate : - carnal fleshly.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G4559 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| σαρκικὰ sarkikà | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Neuter | 1 Corinthians 9:11 | 2 |
| σαρκικοί sarkikoí | Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | 1 Corinthians 3:3 | 2 |
| σαρκικοῖς sarkikoîs | Adjective, Dative, Plural, Neuter | Romans 15:27 | 1 |
| σαρκικῇ sarkikē̂ | Adjective, Dative, Singular, Feminine | 2 Corinthians 1:12 | 1 |
| σαρκικῶν sarkikō̂n | Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Feminine | 1 Peter 2:11 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4559, 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.
