ἀρκέω
to ward off
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).
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
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).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Future, Passive, Indicative, 1st person, Plural 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Present, Passive, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G714 appears — 8 distinct verses across 7 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.
Matthew 1 verse
Luke 1 verse
John 2 verses
2 Corinthians 1 verse
1 Timothy 1 verse
Hebrews 1 verse
3 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.
αρκεω (arkéō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to ward off.” It first appears in Matthew 25:9. Spanning 8 verses in 7 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. John dominates its distribution — 2 of 8 verses. Related forms include αιρω, αιρεομαι and αρα. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G714 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 7 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,240
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,240 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 8 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 8 distinct verses.
- Gospels 4 verses · 50%
- Johannine 3 verses · 38%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 25%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 13%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 13%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 13%
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: Be content 2×, Content 2×
- American Standard Version: Content 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Be content 1×, Be content with 1×, Is sufficient 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Be contented 1×, Be enough 1×, Being content 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G714 across 11 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G714 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 G714 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G714 across 10 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 be possessed of unfailing strength
Word origin
Derived from αιρω (aírō) (G142) — to raise up.
Apparently a primary verb (but probably akin to G142 through the idea of raising a barrier); properly to ward off that is (by implication) to avail (figuratively be satisfactory ): - be content be enough suffice be sufficient.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms G714 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀρκεῖ arkeî | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | John 14:8 | 2 |
| ἀρκέσῃ arkésē | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 25:9 | 1 |
| ἀρκεσθησόμεθα arkesthēsómetha | Verb, Future, Passive, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | 1 Timothy 6:8 | 1 |
| ἀρκεῖσθε arkeîsthe | Verb, Present, Passive, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | Luke 3:14 | 1 |
| ἀρκούμενοι arkoúmenoi | Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Hebrews 13:5 | 1 |
| ἀρκούμενος arkoúmenos | Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | 3 John 1:10 | 1 |
| ἀρκοῦσιν arkoûsin | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | John 6:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G714, 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
- αιρεομαι hairéomai G138 to choose
- αρα ará G685 curse
- αρα ára G686 therefore
- αρεσκω aréskō G700 to please
- αριθμος arithmós G706 number
- αρρην árrhēn G730 male
- αρτι árti G737 now
- αρτος ártos G740 bread
- αρτυω artýō G741 to season
- αρωμα árōma G759 spice
- ορος óros G3735 mountain
Derived from this word
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 αρκεω appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 7 verses in 6 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 7
- 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
- Exodus 12:4 ἀρκέω
- Numbers 11:22 ἀρκέω
- Joshua 17:16 ἀρκέω
- 1 Kings 8:27 ἀρκέω
- 2 Chronicles 6:18 ἀρκέω
- Proverbs 30:15 ἀρκέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G714) 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.
- Exodus 12:4 ἀρκέω and if the household be too little for a lamb, then he and his neighbor next to his house shall take one according to the number of the souls; according to what everyone can eat you shall make your count for the lamb.
- Numbers 11:22 ἀρκέω Shall flocks and herds be slain for them, to suffice them? or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, to suffice them?
- Joshua 17:16 ἀρκέω The children of Joseph said, The hill-country is not enough for us: and all the Canaanites who dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, both they who are in Beth-shean and its towns, and they who are in the valley of Jezreel.
- 1 Kings 8:27 ἀρκέω But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens can't contain you; how much less this house that I have built!
- 2 Chronicles 6:18 ἀρκέω But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens can't contain you; how much less this house which I have built!
- Proverbs 30:15 ἀρκέω "The leach has two daughters: 'Give, give.' "There are three things that are never satisfied; Four that don't say, 'Enough:'
- Proverbs 30:16 ἀρκέω Sheol, The barren womb; The earth that is not satisfied with water; And the fire that doesn't say, 'Enough.'
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G714) 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.
