apeitheia

ἀπείθεια is the abstract noun of the ἀπειθέω / ἀπειθής group, formed with the alpha-privative on the πείθω root (to persuade; middle-passive, to be persuaded, and so to obey). BDAG glosses it "disobedience" and observes that in the New Testament it is always disobedience toward God; it treats the Semitizing genitive phrase υἱοὶ τῆς ἀπειθείας (Eph 2:2; 5:6; Col 3:6) as a characterizing idiom for disobedient people rather than a statement of descent. Bultmann (TDNT 6:1-11, s.v. πείθω κτλ.) argues that the whole word group deliberately fuses Unglaube and Ungehorsam, so that refusal of the kerygma is itself disobedience toward God. That fusion is on the surface in Hebrews, where the ἀπειθήσασιν of 3:18 and the δι᾽ ἀπείθειαν of 4:6 are matched by δι᾽ ἀπιστίαν in 3:19 and by the failure of πίστις in 4:2; Attridge (Hebrews, Hermeneia, on 4:6) accordingly notes that the disobedience and unbelief terminology functions interchangeably within this argument. Louw and Nida place the noun in the semantic domain of obedience and disobedience (domain 36). Romans 11:32 (συνέκλεισεν εἰς ἀπείθειαν) is the one occurrence where the noun is not predicated of a determinate group but names the universal condition into which God has consigned all, a usage Dunn (Romans 9-16, WBC 38B) reads as the deliberate climax of Paul's argument for universal mercy.