StrongerBible

gennēma

γέννημα

GreekG1081“brood, generation, ...”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 3:7Mat 12:34Mat 23:33Luk 3:7
Word studyGEN-nay-mahnoun

What gennēma means

offspring: the young a creature brings forth, used in the Gospels only in the insult "brood of vipers."

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

This noun comes from the verb for fathering or giving birth to someone (γεννάω), and it names the result of that act: the young a creature has brought forth. That is a slightly different idea from the ordinary word for a son or a daughter (τέκνον), which places a person inside a family. This word points back at whatever produced the young, so it always carries a claim about where they came from and what they are therefore like.

All four New Testament uses are the same two word taunt, said to people's faces: they are the young that poisonous snakes produce. John the Baptist says it to the crowds coming out to be baptized (Matthew 3:7, Luke 3:7), and Jesus says it to his opponents (Matthew 12:34, Matthew 23:33). Each time it is followed by a question about escaping judgment or about what comes out of a person's mouth, so the insult is doing an argument's work: what bred you is what you are.

The surrounding words sharpen it. In Matthew 3 and Luke 3 the phrase sits right beside a demand for "fruit worthy of repentance" (καρπός) and a warning that God could raise up children for Abraham out of the stones on the ground: the crowd claims one ancestry, and John hands them another. In Matthew 12 the same taunt introduces the rule that a tree is known by its fruit, and in Matthew 23 it is stacked on the blunter word for snakes. The picture holds steady across all four: a viper's young are dangerous before they have done anything at all, simply because of what made them.

Mat 3:7Mat 12:34Mat 23:33Luk 3:7

What scholars say about gennēma

The standard lexica are unanimous on the sense: γέννημα is a verbal noun from γεννάω denoting that which is begotten or born, hence "offspring, child, brood" (BDAG; LSJ, which also records the wider classical use of this spelling for the products of the earth). All four New Testament occurrences are the vocative plural γεννήματα ἐχιδνῶν, attributed to John the Baptist in the double tradition behind Matthew 3:7 and Luke 3:7 and to Jesus in Matthew 12:34 and 23:33; commentators read the phrase as coherent with the surrounding fruit imagery and with the Baptist's polemic against a presumed Abrahamic descent, and note the doubling with ὄφεις at Matthew 23:33 (Davies and Allison; Nolland; Luz). The lexical question that historically attached to this number is text-critical rather than semantic. Moulton and Milligan showed from the papyri that Hellenistic Greek distinguished γένημα, "produce, crop" (from γίνομαι), from γέννημα, "offspring" (from γεννάω), and the modern critical editions accordingly print γένημα at Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18 and 2 Corinthians 9:10, where the received text and the older lexica (Thayer) read γέννημα and the King James tradition therefore has "fruit of the vine." The geminate and vowel confusions that produced the variation in the manuscript tradition are set out in Blass, Debrunner and Funk. STEPBible's lexical seed for this number preserves the older merger, glossing a second sub-entry "offspring: fruit," although no occurrence in the tagged corpus is assigned to it.

Where scholars disagree about gennēma

Whether the New Testament uses this word for crops and produce as well as for offspring.

  • majorityNo. Hellenistic Greek kept two look-alike nouns apart, one for produce and one for offspring, and the critical editions print the produce word at the Last Supper sayings and at 2 Corinthians 9:10, which leaves this word with the offspring sense only.; BDAG, s.v. γέννημα; s.v. γένημα; J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (1930), s.v. γένημα; F. Blass, A. Debrunner and R. W. Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (1961)
  • minorityYes. The manuscripts confuse the two spellings, and Greek writers did use this spelling for the products of the earth, so the received text and the older lexica keep the produce sense under this word, which is why some English Bibles read "fruit of the vine" here.; Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1889), s.v. γέννημα; LSJ, s.v. γέννημα

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. γέννημα; s.v. γένημαlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. γέννημαlexicon
  • J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (1930), s.v. γένημαlexicon
  • Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1889), s.v. γέννημαlexicon
  • F. Blass, A. Debrunner and R. W. Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (1961)grammar
  • W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, ICC, 3 vols. (1988-1997)commentary
  • John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, NIGTC (2005)commentary
  • Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary, Hermeneia (2007)commentary

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

All attested forms of γέννημα

vocative n p

γεννήματα

Mat 3:7, Mat 12:34, Mat 23:33, Luk 3:7