ἀντλέω
to draw water
‘to draw water’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-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
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Perfect
- A completed past action with continuing present results.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- 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”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
1 distinct verse where G501 appears in the Perfect tense, across 1 book. 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.
John 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.
“to draw water” is the headline sense of the Greek verb αντλεω (antléō). The Greek New Testament uses it only 4 verses. It clusters heavily in John, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. First canonically at John 2:8, it enters the text early. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G501 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- John 4 verses 100%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 4 verses · 100%
- Johannine 4 verses · 100%
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: Draw 2×
- American Standard Version: Draw 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Draw 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Draw 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G501 across 4 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 G501 across 4 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G501 across 4 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 G501 across 5 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.
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 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 draw out of a ship's bilge-water, to bale or pump out
- to draw water
Word origin
Origin: from antlos (the hold of a ship)
From ἄντλος antlos (the hold of a ship); to bale up (properly bilge water) that is dip water (with a bucket pitcher etc.): - draw (out).
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G501 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀντλήσατε antlḗsate | Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | John 2:8 | 1 |
| ἀντλεῖν antleîn | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | John 4:15 | 1 |
| ἀντλῆσαι antlē̂sai | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | John 4:7 | 1 |
| ἠντληκότες ēntlēkótes | Verb, Perfect, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | John 2:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G501, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αντλεω appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 3 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 24:13 ἀντλέω
- Exodus 2:16 ἀντλέω
- Isaiah 12:3 ἀντλέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G501) 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.
- Genesis 24:13 ἀντλέω Behold, I am standing by the spring of water. The daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water.
- Genesis 24:20 ἀντλέω She hurried, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran again to the well to draw, and drew for all his camels.
- Exodus 2:16 ἀντλέω Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father's flock.
- Exodus 2:17 ἀντλέω The shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock.
- Exodus 2:19 ἀντλέω They said, "An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and moreover he drew water for us, and watered the flock."
- Isaiah 12:3 ἀντλέω Therefore with joy you shall draw water out of the wells of salvation.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G501) 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.
