StrongerBible

allēlōn

ἀλλήλων

GreekG0240“one another, each other, ...”

Appears 101 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 24:10 (2×)Mat 25:32Mrk 4:41Mrk 8:16Mrk 9:34Mrk 9:50Mrk 15:31Luk 2:15Luk 4:36Luk 6:11Luk 7:32Luk 8:25Luk 12:1Luk 20:14Luk 23:12Jhn 5:44Jhn 6:43Jhn 11:56Jhn 13:14Jhn 13:35Jhn 16:19Act 15:39Act 19:38Rom 1:12Rom 2:15Rom 12:5Rom 15:51Co 12:25Gal 5:13Gal 5:15Gal 5:17Gal 5:26Eph 5:21Jas 5:161Pe 5:5Rev 11:10
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeal-LAY-lonereciprocal pronoun

What allēlōn means

one another, each other: the members of a group acting reciprocally, each toward the others and back again.

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

The word means simply "one another" or "each other." It is a reciprocal pronoun: it points back to a group and says the members act toward one another. It has no singular and never serves as the subject of a sentence, because it always describes a group acting on itself. It was built long before the New Testament by doubling the ordinary Greek word for "other" (ἄλλος), and its meaning never drifted: it means the same thing in Homer, in everyday letters and contracts, and in Paul.

Because the pronoun itself is so plain, all of its color comes from the verb it travels with, not from the word itself. The same small word runs across the whole range of human interaction:

  • neutral reporting, where people simply speak to and look at each other (the crowds and disciples of the Gospels and Acts)
  • the warm commands of the letters, where believers are told to love, forgive, welcome, and encourage each other
  • open hostility, where people bite and devour, betray, or even kill one another

In the letters especially, "one another" becomes the everyday word for the shared life of the church. Paul grounds it in a single image: believers are "members of one another" (Romans 12:5; Ephesians 4:25), parts of one body, and the long strings of commands simply spell out what that mutual belonging looks like in practice. It is ordinary Greek carrying an extraordinary weight, describing a community meant to be mutually loving, honoring, forgiving, and serving rather than one-directional.

Mrk 4:41Mrk 9:34Luk 2:15Luk 24:32Jhn 4:33Jhn 6:52Jhn 13:22Jhn 13:34Jhn 16:17Act 2:7Act 26:31Act 28:4
Jhn 13:34

Whether Jesus' command to love one another is limited to fellow disciples as an inward-facing, in-group ethic, or is bounded in its immediate reference to the community yet aimed outward as the ground of the community's witness to the world.

  • minorityThe love command is directed within the disciple community and does not itself extend to outsiders; the Fourth Gospel's ethic is that of a bounded group.; Ernst Käsemann, The Testament of Jesus; Wayne A. Meeks, "The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism," JBL 91 (1972)
  • majorityThe reference is bounded to the community, but the mutual love is the visible sign by which outsiders come to believe (John 13:35; 17:20-23), so it serves mission rather than sealing off a sect.; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC); Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary

What scholars say about allēlōn

ἀλλήλων is a defective reciprocal pronoun attested only in the oblique plural (genitive ἀλλήλων, dative ἀλλήλοις, accusative ἀλλήλους), with no nominative and no singular; it is formed by reduplication of ἄλλος, paralleled by Latin alter alterum and Sanskrit anyonya. BDAG, LSJ, and Louw-Nida (Domain 92, discourse referentials) treat the sense as stable and simple ("one another, mutually"), and Muraoka finds no distinctive Septuagint semantics. The grammars (BDF §287; Robertson, Grammar 690; Turner, MHT 3.43) note that the reflexive ἑαυτῶν frequently substitutes for it, sometimes within one clause (Colossians 3:13), though the overlap is one-directional: ἑαυτῶν may carry the reciprocal sense while ἀλλήλων is never self-directed. Wallace (Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 350-51) observes its characteristic concentration in paraenesis, grounded in the believers' organic union with the risen Christ, and the EDNT entry (Kramer, 1:63-64) counts about 100 occurrences clustered in the hortatory sections of the epistles. Kittel and Spicq give no entry, judging that the pronoun carries no theological freight on its own; its weight is entirely context-driven. The consensus (Moulton, Lee, Decker, Joosten) rejects any Semitism in the pronoun itself, tracing Hebrew influence only through preserved phrase patterns such as Ephesians 4:25's echo of Zechariah 8:16. The principal disputes are contextual: whether ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις (Ephesians 5:21) is fully mutual or distributive (Lincoln, Payne, Vasser against Grudem, O'Brien), and whether the Johannine love command is inward-facing (Käsemann, Meeks) or missional in aim (Carson, Keener).

Where scholars disagree about allēlōn

Whether the reciprocal pronoun always means "everyone to everyone" (fully mutual) or can also mean "some members to others" (a distributive reciprocity), which bears directly on how much force a command carrying it has.

  • majorityFully reciprocal: the word means each member acts toward every other, so a command using it applies to all alike; this is its uniform sense from Homer through the papyri and the whole New Testament.; LSJ, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. ἀλλήλων; Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ (2009); Murray Vasser, "Does Ephesians 5:21 Teach Mutual Submission?" Lexington Theological Quarterly (2024)
  • minorityDistributive: the word can mean some do the action to others rather than everyone to everyone (as in "they slew one another"), so a command using it need not bind all members equally.; Wayne Grudem, "The Myth of Mutual Submission as an Interpretation of Ephesians 5:21," JBMW 1 (1996)
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. ἀλλήλωνlexicon
  • LSJ, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. ἀλλήλωνlexicon
  • Louw & Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains §92.26lexicon
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagintlexicon
  • BDF (Blass, Debrunner, Funk), A Greek Grammar of the New Testament §287grammar
  • A. T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, 690grammar
  • N. Turner, A Grammar of New Testament Greek, vol. 3: Syntax (Moulton-Howard-Turner), 43grammar
  • D. B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 350-51grammar
  • H. Kramer, "ἀλλήλων," Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament 1:63-64dictionary
  • Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT)commentary
  • Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC)commentary
  • Wayne Grudem, "The Myth of Mutual Submission as an Interpretation of Ephesians 5:21," JBMW 1 (1996)article
  • Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ (2009)monograph
  • Murray Vasser, "Does Ephesians 5:21 Teach Mutual Submission?" Lexington Theological Quarterly (2024)article
  • D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC)commentary
  • Ernst Käsemann, The Testament of Jesusmonograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of ἀλλήλων

accusative m p

ἀλλήλους

Mat 24:10, Mat 24:10, Mrk 4:41, Mrk 8:16, Mrk 9:34, Mrk 15:31, Luk 2:15, Luk 4:36

genitive m p

ἀλλήλων

Mat 25:32, Luk 23:12, Jhn 5:44, Jhn 6:43, Jhn 11:56, Jhn 13:14, Jhn 16:19, Act 15:39

dative m p

ἀλλήλοις

Mrk 9:50, Luk 7:32, Jhn 13:35, Act 19:38, Rom 1:12, Rom 15:5, Gal 5:13, Gal 5:26

dative n p

ἀλλήλοις

Gal 5:17