στήκω
to stand firm
‘to stand firm’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural 4 times (33%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural 3 times (25%)
- Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (17%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (17%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (8%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 12 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G4739 appears — 12 distinct verses across 9 books. 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 2 verses
- Mark 3:31 στήκοντες pres act ptcp nom pl masc His mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent to him, calling him.
- Mark 11:25 στήκετε pres act ind 2pl Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father, who is in heaven, may also forgive you your transgressions.
John 2 verses
- John 1:26 στήκει pres act ind 3sg John answered them, "I baptize in water, but among you stands one whom you don't know.
- John 8:44 ἔστηκεν impf act ind 3sg You are of your Father, the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and doesn't stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks on his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it.
Romans 1 verse
1 Corinthians 1 verse
Galatians 1 verse
Philippians 2 verses
- Philippians 1:27 στήκετε pres act ind 2pl Only let your manner of life be worthy of the Gospel of Christ, that, whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of your state, that you stand firm in one spirit, with one soul striving for the faith of the Gospel;
- Philippians 4:1 στήκετε pres act impv 2pl Therefore, my brothers, beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand firm in the Lord, my beloved.
1 Thessalonians 1 verse
2 Thessalonians 1 verse
Revelation 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.
στηκω — transliterated stḗkō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to stand firm.” The King James Version usually renders it “stand fast,” while modern versions prefer “stand firm” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. Spanning 12 verses in 9 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. Debuting at Mark 3:31, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 3 senses. 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 G4739 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 9 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 9 of 27 New Testament books.
- #904
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 904 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 12 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Mark 2 verses 17%
- John 2 verses 17%
- Philippians 2 verses 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 12 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 7 verses · 58%
- Gospels 4 verses · 33%
- Johannine 3 verses · 25%
- Revelation 1 verse · 8%
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: Stand fast 5×
- American Standard Version: Stand fast 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Stand firm 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Stand firm 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4739 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4739 across 8 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 G4739 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 G4739 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 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.
- to stand firm
- to persevere, to persist
- to keep one's standing
Word origin
Derived from ιστημι (hístēmi) (G2476) — to stand.
From the perfect tense of G2476 ; to be stationary that is (figuratively) to persevere : - stand (fast).
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G4739 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| στήκετε stḗkete | Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | 1 Corinthians 16:13 | 7 |
| στήκει stḗkei | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | John 1:26 | 2 |
| στήκοντες stḗkontes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Mark 3:31 | 1 |
| ἔστηκεν éstēken | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | John 8:44 | 1 |
| ἕστηκεν héstēken | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Revelation 12:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4739, 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
- σθενοω sthenóō G4599 to strengthen
- σταδιον stádion G4712 furlong
- σταμνος stámnos G4713 jar
- στασις stásis G4714 insurrection
- σταυρος staurós G4716 cross
- σταχυς stáchys G4719 ear of grain
- στελλω stéllō G4724 to set
- στενος stenós G4728 narrow
- στερεος stereós G4731 strong
- στηθος stēthos G4738 breast
- στηριζω stērízō G4741 to establish
- στοα stoá G4745 portico
- στυλος stŷlos G4769 pillar
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 15 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word στηκω appears 1 time in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1 verse in 1 book.
- 1
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 1
- verse
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 16:26 στήκω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4739) 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.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4739) 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.
