ἀποσπάω
to tear away
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).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
1 distinct verse where G645 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.
Acts 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.
αποσπαω — transliterated apospáō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to tear away.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. Its uses cluster heavily in Acts (50% of all occurrences). Debuting at Matthew 26:51, it then recurs through the corpus. From the same root come απο, απαγγελλω and απαγχομαι. 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 G645 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.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 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) 3 verses · 75%
- Gospels 2 verses · 50%
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 away 1×, Drew 1×, Was withdrawn 1×
- American Standard Version: Draw away 1×, Drew 1×, Parted 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Draw away 1×, Drew 1×, We had torn ourselves away 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Drew 1×, Having been parted 1×, Order to draw away 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G645 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G645 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G645 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G645 across 4 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.
- to draw off, tear away
Word origin
Derived from απο (apó) (G575) — from.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G645 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀπέσπασεν apéspasen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 26:51 | 1 |
| ἀπεσπάσθη apespásthē | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 22:41 | 1 |
| ἀποσπασθέντας apospasthéntas | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Participle, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 21:1 | 1 |
| ἀποσπᾶν apospân | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Acts 20:30 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G645, 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
- απαγγελλω apangéllō G518 to report
- απαγχομαι apánchomai G519 to strangle
- απαγω apágō G520 to lead away
- απαιρω apaírō G522 to take away
- απαιτεω apaitéō G523 to demand back
- απαλγεω apalgéō G524 to cease grieving
- απαλλασσω apallássō G525 to depart
- απαλλοτριοω apallotrióō G526 to estrange
- απανταω apantáō G528 to meet
- απαρνεομαι aparnéomai G533 to deny
- απαρτι apárti G534 henceforth
- απαρχη aparchḗ G536 to offer firstfruits
- απαυγασμα apaúgasma G541 brightness
- απειδω apeídō G542 to look away
- απειμι ápeimi G548 to depart
- απειμι ápeimi G549 to depart
- απειπομην apeipómēn G550 to declare
- απεκδεχομαι apekdéchomai G553 waiting for
- απεκδυομαι apekdýomai G554 to despoil
- απελαυνω apelaúnō G556 to drive away
- απελεγμος apelegmós G557 censure
- απελευθερος apeleútheros G558 freedman
- απελπιζω apelpízō G560 not despairing
- απεναντι apénanti G561 opposite
+85 more words share this root (not shown).
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 111 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αποσπαω appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 6 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Leviticus 22:24 ἀποσπάω
- Joshua 8:6 ἀποσπάω
- Judges 16:9 ἀποσπάω
- Job 41:9 ἀποσπάω
- Isaiah 28:9 ἀποσπάω
- Jeremiah 12:14 ἀποσπάω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G645) 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.
- Leviticus 22:24 ἀποσπάω That which has its testicles bruised, crushed, broken, or cut, you shall not offer to Yahweh; neither shall you do thus in your land.
- Joshua 8:6 ἀποσπάω and they will come out after us, until we have drawn them away from the city; for they will say, They flee before us, as at the first: so we will flee before them;
- Judges 16:9 ἀποσπάω Now she had liers-in-wait abiding in the inner chamber. She said to him, The Philistines are on you, Samson. He broke the cords, as a string of tow is broken when it touches the fire. So his strength was not known.
- Job 41:9 ἀποσπάω Behold, the hope of him is in vain. Will not one be cast down even at the sight of him?
- Isaiah 28:9 ἀποσπάω Whom will he teach knowledge? and whom will he make to understand the message? those who are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts?
- Jeremiah 12:14 ἀποσπάω Thus says Yahweh against all my evil neighbors, who touch the inheritance which I have caused my people Israel to inherit: behold, I will pluck them up from off their land, and will pluck up the house of Judah from among them.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G645) 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.
