ψηλαφάω
to touch
‘to touch’ 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).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Optative
- Expresses a wish or a remote possibility.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 distinct verse where G5584 appears in the Present 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.
Hebrews 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.
ψηλαφαω (psēlapháō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to touch.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. It concentrates in Luke, which alone accounts for 25% of its uses. It first appears in Luke 24:39. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5584 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.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 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 →
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.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 50%
- Gospels 1 verse · 25%
- Johannine 1 verse · 25%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 25%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 25%
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: Handle 1×, Have handled 1×, Might be touched 1×
- American Standard Version: Handle 1×, Handled 1×, Might be touched 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Can be touched 1×, Reach out for 1×, Touch 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Can be touched 1×, Have touched 1×, They might feel around for 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5584 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5584 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5584 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5584 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 handle, touch and feel
- metaph. mentally to seek after tokens of a person or a thing
Word origin
Derived from ψαλλω (psállō) (G5567) — to pluck.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G5584 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ψηλαφήσατέ psēlaphḗsaté | Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | Luke 24:39 | 1 |
| ψηλαφήσειαν psēlaphḗseian | Verb, Aorist, Active, Optative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 17:27 | 1 |
| ψηλαφωμένῳ psēlaphōménō | Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Dative, Singular, Neuter | Hebrews 12:18 | 1 |
| ἐψηλάφησαν epsēláphēsan | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | 1 John 1:1 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5584, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ψηλαφαω appears 15 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 13 verses in 8 books.
- 15
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 13
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 27:12 ψηλαφάω
- Deuteronomy 28:29 ψηλαφάω
- Judges 16:26 ψηλαφάω
- Job 5:14 ψηλαφάω
- Psalms 113:15 ψηλαφάω
- Isaiah 59:10 ψηλαφάω
- Nahum 3:1 ψηλαφάω
- Zechariah 3:9 ψηλαφάω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5584) 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 27:12 ψηλαφάω What if my father touches me? I will seem to him as a deceiver, and I would bring a curse on myself, and not a blessing."
- Genesis 27:21 ψηλαφάω Isaac said to Jacob, "Please come near, that I may feel you, my son, whether you are really my son Esau or not."
- Genesis 27:22 ψηλαφάω Jacob went near to Isaac his father. He felt him, and said, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau."
- Deuteronomy 28:29 ψηλαφάω and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind gropes in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways: and you shall be only oppressed and robbed always, and there shall be none to save you.
- Judges 16:26 ψηλαφάω and Samson said to the boy who held him by the hand, Allow me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house rests, that I may lean on them.
- Job 5:14 ψηλαφάω They meet with darkness in the day-time, And grope at noonday as in the night.
- Job 12:25 ψηλαφάω They grope in the dark without light. He makes them stagger like a drunken man.
- Psalms 113:15 ψηλαφάω
- Psalms 134:17 ψηλαφάω
- Isaiah 59:10 ψηλαφάω We grope for the wall like the blind; yes, we grope as those who have no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the twilight; among those who are lusty we are as dead men.
- Nahum 3:1 ψηλαφάω Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery. The prey doesn't depart.
- Zechariah 3:9 ψηλαφάω For, behold, the stone that I have set before Joshua; on one stone are seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the engraving of it,' says Yahweh of Hosts, 'and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.
- Zechariah 9:13 ψηλαφάω For indeed I bend Judah as a bow for me. I have filled the bow with Ephraim; And I will stir up your sons, Zion, Against your sons, Greece, And will make you like the sword of a mighty man.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5584) 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.
