ahimorroeō

This verb appears only once in the New Testament, describing the woman who came up behind Jesus after bleeding for twelve years (Matthew 9:20). It joins the ordinary word for blood to a verb meaning "to flow," so at root it means simply "to flow with blood." Matthew uses a form that pictures the action as ongoing, and the added "twelve years" stretches it out: this is not a single bleed but a flow that had continued without stopping.

In Greek medical writing the word was a technical term. It named an abnormal, unhealthy loss of blood, and in particular a slow, continuous flow rather than a sudden burst. That precision fits the woman's case exactly: a chronic condition of the womb that no physician had been able to stop.

The same word carries a second history. When ancient translators rendered the Old Testament into Greek, they used it once, at Leviticus 15:33, to sum up the law about a woman with a lasting discharge. So for a reader who knew the Greek scriptures, the word pointed two directions at once: to Greek medicine and to the purity law of Israel. A woman who had bled for twelve years would fall under that law as permanently in her flow, unable to complete the days of cleansing it required.

Matthew tells the story with this one compact word, where Mark and Luke use a longer phrase built on the noun "a flow, a discharge" (ῥύσις), which closely echoes the wording of Leviticus. Why Matthew traded the fuller expression for a single medical term is debated (the main views are laid out below). What is not in doubt is the condition itself: a long, chronic bleeding that left the woman both ill and, under the law, unclean.