StrongerBible

anomos

ἄνομος

GreekG0459“lawless, transgressors, ...”

Appears 10 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mrk 15:28Luk 22:37Act 2:231Co 9:21 (4×)2Th 2:81Ti 1:92Pe 2:8
Compound of
Alphaα, ἈλφαAlpha4G1
nomosνόμοςlaw198G3551
Root family
Word studyAH-no-mosadjective

What anomos means

1

outside the law of Moses: not living under Israel's law, and so a Gentile

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled

Greek built this word by putting "not" in front of "law," and in this first sense the negative is simply factual. It describes people who were never given Israel's law and so do not order their lives by it. That is a statement about where someone stands, not a verdict on how they behave, and used this way the word comes close to a plain label for a Gentile.

Paul is the only writer who uses it so, and he uses it with care. Describing how he adapts himself to reach different people, he says he became like one outside the law in order to win those outside the law, and then guards the point at once: he is not free of God's law but bound within Christ's. The same word does double duty in a single sentence, first as a neutral description of the people he is trying to reach, then, in the phrase he denies, as the moral charge he wants no part of.

That guard is the clue to the whole word. Not having the law of Moses is a circumstance a person is simply born into. Standing outside God's claim altogether is something else, and it is what the word's other meaning names.

1Co 9:21 (4×)
2

lawless: setting God's law aside, and so wicked or criminal

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

Here the negative is a charge rather than a description. The person is not someone the law never reached but someone who pushes it aside, and the law in view is God's, so the word carries the weight of rebellion rather than mere illegality. The Greek Old Testament had already fixed this usage, applying the word to the wicked and to those who rebel against God, and the New Testament writers inherit it.

The shades within it are set by what the word attaches to.

  • Applied to people, it marks them as offenders: the wrongdoers Jesus was counted among at his death, the hands that carried out his execution, the opening names in the list of those the law exists for in the first letter to Timothy.
  • Applied to deeds, it says the acts themselves flout God's law, as Peter says of what Lot had to watch day after day.
  • Applied as a title, it names one figure in whom that defiance is gathered up at the end of the age, the personal counterpart of the lawlessness (ἀνομία) the same letter describes already at work.

Nothing in the word itself decides which of these is meant; the sentence does. What stays constant is the measure being used: a standard that is fully binding, and a person or an act set against it.

Nuances

2aa person who defies God's law: a wrongdoer or outlaw, someone reckoned among offenders
Mrk 15:28Luk 22:37Act 2:231Ti 1:9
2bof actions rather than people: done in open defiance of God's law
2Pe 2:8
2c"the lawless one": the single end-time figure whose whole character is defiance of God
2Th 2:8

What scholars say about anomos

The standard lexicons divide the word in two. BDAG separates the sense of being without law, applied to Gentiles outside the Mosaic covenant, from the sense of violating law, applied both to persons and to deeds, and treats the use with the article in 2 Thessalonians 2:8 as a title. LSJ documents the same twofold usage in classical Greek, lawless and impious, of persons and of actions, with moral force already present in Attic writers. In the Septuagint the adjective renders a range of Hebrew terms for the wicked and the rebellious, most prominently rasha and the participle of pasha in Isaiah 53:12, which is the form quoted at Luke 22:37 and Mark 15:28. Gutbrod, treating the nomos family in TDNT, stresses that the negation presupposes a law that is binding rather than absent, and Hübner in EDNT registers the same split between status and conduct. On 1 Corinthians 9:21 the commentators (Fee, Thiselton) read the sequence as a deliberate play on the word, the qualifying phrases marking the shift from missionary accommodation to continuing obligation under Christ. On Mark 15:28 Metzger's textual commentary records the verse as absent from the earliest witnesses and assimilated from Luke 22:37. Acts 2:23 is the one genuinely contested placement: a strong line of Acts commentary, including Barrett, takes the plural as a designation of the Romans as Gentiles rather than as a moral judgment, while most modern translations render it as a moral charge.

Sources

  • BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (2000), s.v. ἄνομοςlexicon
  • LSJ, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (1996), s.v. ἄνομοςlexicon
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Peeters, 2009), s.v. ἄνομοςlexicon
  • W. Gutbrod, ἄνομος, ἀνομία, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 4:1085-87dictionary
  • H. Hübner, ἄνομος, in Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (EDNT), vol. 1dictionary
  • B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (1994), on Mark 15:28monograph
  • G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT, rev. ed. 2014), on 9:21commentary
  • A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC, 2000), on 9:21commentary
  • C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles (ICC, 1994), on 2:23commentary

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

All attested forms of ἄνομος

genitive m p

ἀνόμων

Mrk 15:28, Luk 22:37, Act 2:23

nominative m s

ἄνομος

1Co 9:21, 1Co 9:21, 2Th 2:8

dative m p

ἀνόμοις

1Co 9:21, 1Ti 1:9

accusative m p

ἀνόμους

1Co 9:21

dative n p

ἀνόμοις

2Pe 2:8