βάσανος
touchstone
‘touchstone’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Dative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 distinct verse where G931 appears in the Genitive case, 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.
Luke 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.
“touchstone” is the headline sense of the Greek noun βασανος (básanos). The Greek New Testament uses it only 3 verses. It clusters heavily in Luke, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. First canonically at Matthew 4:24, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G931 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,203
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,203 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Gospels 3 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 67%
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: Torments 2×
- American Standard Version: Torments 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Torment 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Torment 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G931 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G931 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G931 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 G931 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 3 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.
- a touchstone…
- the rack or instrument of torture by which one is forced to divulge the truth
- torture, torment, acute pains
Word origin
Derived from βασις (básis) (G939) — foot.
Perhaps remotely from the same as G939 (through the notion of going to the bottom); a touch stone that is (by analogy) torture : - torment.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G931 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| βασάνοις basánois | Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine | Matthew 4:24 | 2 |
| βασάνου basánou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Luke 16:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G931, 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
- βαθυς bathýs G901 deep
- βαΐον baḯon G902 palm branch
- βαρος báros G922 heaviness
- βασιλευς basileús G935 king
- βασταζω bastázō G941 to take up
- βεβαιος bébaios G949 firm
- βεβηλος bébēlos G952 profane
- βημα bēma G968 judgment seat
- βωμος bōmós G1041 elevated place
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 12 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word βασανος appears 11 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 11 verses in 2 books.
- 11
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 11
- 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
- 1 Samuel 6:3 βάσανος
- Ezekiel 3:20 βάσανος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G931) 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.
- 1 Samuel 6:3 βάσανος They said, "If you send away the ark of the God of Israel, don't send it empty; but by all means return him a trespass-offering: then you shall be healed, and it shall be known to you why his hand is not removed from you."
- 1 Samuel 6:4 βάσανος Then they said, "What shall be the trespass-offering which we shall return to him?" They said, "Five golden tumors, and five golden mice, [according to] the number of the lords of the Philistines; for one plague was on you all, and on your lords.
- 1 Samuel 6:8 βάσανος and take the ark of Yahweh, and lay it on the cart; and put the jewels of gold, which you return him for a trespass-offering, in a coffer by the side of it; and send it away, that it may go.
- 1 Samuel 6:17 βάσανος These are the golden tumors which the Philistines returned for a trespass-offering to Yahweh: for Ashdod one, for Gaza one, for Ashkelon one, for Gath one, for Ekron one;
- Ezekiel 3:20 βάσανος Again, when a righteous man does turn from his righteousness, and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die: because you have not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, and his righteous deeds which he has done shall not be remembered; but his blood will I require at your hand.
- Ezekiel 7:19 βάσανος They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be as an unclean thing; their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of Yahweh: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels; because it has been the stumbling block of their iniquity.
- Ezekiel 12:18 βάσανος Son of man, eat your bread with quaking, and drink your water with trembling and with fearfulness;
- Ezekiel 16:52 βάσανος You also, bear you your own shame, in that you have given judgment for your sisters; through your sins that you have committed more abominable than they, they are more righteous that you: yes, be also confounded, and bear your shame, in that you have justified your sisters.
- Ezekiel 16:54 βάσανος that you may bear your own shame, and may be ashamed because of all that you have done, in that you are a comfort to them.
- Ezekiel 32:24 βάσανος There is Elam and all her multitude round about her grave; all of them slain, fallen by the sword, who are gone down uncircumcised into the lower parts of the earth, who caused their terror in the land of the living, and have borne their shame with those who go down to the pit.
- Ezekiel 32:30 βάσανος There are the princes of the north, all of them, and all the Sidonians, who are gone down with the slain; in the terror which they caused by their might they are put to shame; and they lie uncircumcised with those who are slain by the sword, and bear their shame with those who go down to the pit.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G931) 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.
