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ἀρχιερεύς

high priest

G749 Strong's Greek
archiereús Transliteration
/ar-khee-er-yuce'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 121 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.

At its core, αρχιερευς (archiereús) means “high priest.” First canonically at Matthew 2:4, it enters the text early. It appears 118 verses across 6 books of the Greek New Testament, among its common vocabulary. It shares a root with αρχη, αρχαιος and αρχηγος. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
chief priest
Modern gloss
high priest
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 G749 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 →

118
distinct verses
The word appears in 118 distinct verses.
6 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 2:4
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 2:4.
Hebrews 13:11
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Hebrews 13:11.
#136
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 136 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 118 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 79 · 67%
  • Acts 22 · 19%
  • Pauline Epistles 0 · 0%
  • General Epistles 17 · 14%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

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 118 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 79 verses · 67%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 36 verses · 31%
  • Johannine 20 verses · 17%
  • Hebrews 17 verses · 14%

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: Chief priests 64×, High priest 50×, High priest's 4×
  • American Standard Version: Chief priests 60×, High priest 52×, Chief priest 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Chief priests 64×, High priest 52×, High priesthood 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Chief priests 64×, High priest 53×, A 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G749 across 123 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Chief priests” 64×
  • “High priest” 50×
  • “High priest's” 4×
  • “High priests” 3×

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 G749 across 121 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Chief priests” 60×
  • “High priest” 52×
  • “Chief priest” 2×
  • “High priests” 2×

Plus 5 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 G749 across 122 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Chief priests” 64×
  • “High priest” 52×
  • “High priesthood” 2×
  • “High priests” 2×

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 G749 across 125 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Chief priests” 64×
  • “High priest” 53×
  • “A” 3×
  • “Chief priest” 2×
  • “High priests” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.


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.

  1. chief priest, high priest

Word origin

Derived from αρχη (archḗ) (G746) — beginning.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TDNT: 07:25,3

From G746 and G2409 ; the high priest (literally of the Jews typically christ); by extension a chief priest : - chief (high) priest chief of the priests.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 8 distinct written forms G749 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἀρχιερεῖς archiereîs Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 21:15 49
ἀρχιερεὺς archiereùs Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 26:62 24
ἀρχιερέως archieréōs Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 26:3 16
ἀρχιερέων archieréōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 16:21 10
ἀρχιερέα archieréa Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 26:57 9
ἀρχιερεῦσιν archiereûsin Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 20:18 6
ἀρχιερεύς archiereús Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Acts 7:1 4
ἀρχιερεῖ archiereî Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine John 18:15 3

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G749, 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

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 11 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word αρχιερευς appears 3 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 3 verses in 2 books.

3
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
3
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G749) 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.

These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G749) 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.