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σωτηρία

salvation

also: deliverance, preservation, safety fuller range ↓

G4991 Strong's Greek
sōtēría Transliteration
/so-tay-ree'-ah/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 45 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.

“salvation” is the headline sense of the Greek noun σωτηρια (sōtēría). Scripture first uses it in Luke 1:69. It appears 44 verses across 15 books of the Greek New Testament, among its moderately common vocabulary. Not a single-sense word, it carries 3 senses, among them “deliverance”, “preservation”, and “safety”. It shares a root with σωτηρ and σωτηριον. See the sense tree, 44-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
deliver
Modern gloss
salvation
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G4991 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 →

44
distinct verses
The word appears in 44 distinct verses.
15 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 15 of 27 New Testament books.
Luke 1:69
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Luke 1:69.
Revelation 19:1
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 19:1.
#337
by frequency
Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 337 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 44 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 5 · 11%
  • Acts 6 · 14%
  • Pauline Epistles 17 · 39%
  • General Epistles 13 · 30%
  • Revelation 3 · 7%

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 44 distinct verses.

  • Pauline corpus 17 verses · 39%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 10 verses · 23%
  • Hebrews 7 verses · 16%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 6 verses · 14%
  • Gospels 5 verses · 11%
  • Johannine 4 verses · 9%
  • Revelation 3 verses · 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: Salvation 39×
  • American Standard Version: Salvation 37×, Is salvation 2×, Of 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Salvation 38×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Salvation 43×, Of 5×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4991 across 44 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Salvation” 39×

Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G4991 across 44 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Salvation” 37×
  • “Is salvation” 2×
  • “Of” 2×

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 G4991 across 45 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Salvation” 38×

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 G4991 across 50 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Salvation” 43×
  • “Of” 5×

Plus 2 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.

  1. deliverance, preservation, safety, salvation
  2. salvation as the present possession of all true Christians
  3. future salvation…

Word origin

Derived from σωτηρ (sōtḗr) (G4990) — savior.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TDNT: 23:05,1

Feminine of a derivative of G4990 as (properly abstract) noun; rescue or safety (physically or morally): - deliver health salvation save saving.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 3 distinct written forms G4991 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
σωτηρίας sōtērías Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Luke 1:69 19
σωτηρίαν sōtērían Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Luke 1:71 18
σωτηρία sōtēría Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Luke 19:9 8

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4991, 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

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word σωτηρια appears 104 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 100 verses in 17 books.

104
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
100
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
17 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 17 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4991) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 100. 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 (G4991) 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.