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Ἀβιάθαρ

Abiathar

Thayer's lists 2 entries for ‘Abiathar’ fuller range ↓

G8 Strong's Greek
Abiathár Transliteration
/ab-ee-ath'-ar/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 1 appearance

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.

Αβιαθαρ (Abiathár) is a Greek name most often rendered “Abiathar.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. Mark dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. A true hapax — its single appearance is Mark 2:26. See 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Abiathar
Modern gloss
Abiathar
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G8 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
Mark 2:26
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Mark 2:26.
#3,503
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 1 · 100%
  • Acts 0 · 0%
  • Pauline Epistles 0 · 0%
  • General Epistles 0 · 0%
  • 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 1 distinct verse.

  • Gospels 1 verse · 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: Abiathar 1×
  • American Standard Version: Abiathar 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Abiathar 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Abiathar 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G8 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Abiathar” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G8 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Abiathar” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G8 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Abiathar” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G8 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Abiathar” 1×

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.

  1. Abiathar = "father of abundance"
  2. the name of a high priest

Word origin

Derived from אביתר (ʼEbyâthâr) (H54) — Abiathar.

Part of speech: Proper Name Masculine

Of hebrew origin [ H54 ]; Abiathar an Israelite : - Abiathar.

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


Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Abiathar). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.

Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897

Father of abundance, or my father excels, the son of Ahimelech the high priest. He was the tenth high priest, and the fourth in descent from Eli. When his father was slain with the priests of Nob, he escaped, and bearing with him the ephod, he joined David, who was then in the cave of Adullam (1 Sam. 22:20-23; 23:6). He remained with David, and became priest of the party of which he was the leader (1 Sam. 30:7). When David ascended the throne of Judah, Abiathar was appointed high priest (1 Chr. 15:11; 1 Kings 2:26) and the "king's companion" (1 Chr. 27:34). Meanwhile Zadok, of the house of Eleazar, had been made high priest. These appointments continued in force till the end of David's reign (1 Kings 4:4). Abiathar was deposed (the sole historical instance of the deposition of a high priest) and banished to his home at Anathoth by Solomon, because he took part in the attempt to raise Adonijah to the throne. The priesthood thus passed from the house of Ithamar (1 Sam. 2:30-36; 1 Kings 1:19; 2:26, 27). Zadok now became sole high priest. In Mark 2:26, reference is made to an occurrence in "the days of Abiathar the high priest." But from 1 Sam. 22, we learn explicitly that this event took place when Ahimelech, the father of Abiathar, was high priest. The apparent discrepancy is satisfactorily explained by interpreting the words in Mark as referring to the life-time of Abiathar, and not to the term of his holding the office of high priest. It is not implied in Mark that he was actual high priest at the time referred to. Others, however, think that the loaves belonged to Abiathar, who was at that time (Lev. 24:9) a priest, and that he either himself gave them to David, or persuaded his father to give them.

Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863

(father of abundance, i.e. liberal), High priest and fourth in descent from Eli. (B.C. 1060-1012.) Abiathar was the only one of the all the sons of Ahimelech the high priest who escaped the slaughter inflicted upon his father's house by Saul, in revenge for his father's house by Saul, in revenge of his having inquired of the Lord for David and given him the shew-bread to eat. (1 Samuel 22:1) ... Abiathar having become high priest fled to David, and was thus enabled to inquire of the Lord for him. (1 Samuel 23:9; 30:7; 2 Samuel 2:1; 5:19) etc. He adhered to David in his wanderings while pursued by Saul; he was with him while he reigned in Hebron, and afterwards in Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 2:1-3) He continued faithful to him in Absalom's rebellion. (2 Samuel 15:24,29,35,36; 17:15-17; 19:11) When, however, Adonijah set himself up fro David's successor on the throne, in opposition to Solomon, Abiathar sided with him, while Zadok was on Solomon's side. For this Abiathar was deprived of the high priesthood. Zadok had joined David at Hebron, (1 Chronicles 12:28) so that there was henceforth who high priests in the reign of David, and till the deposition of Abiathar by Solomon, when Zadok became the sole high priest.

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

excellent father; father of the remnant

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word Αβιαθαρ appears 29 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 28 verses in 4 books.

29
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
28
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
4 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G8) 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 (G8) 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).

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