to wait for someone or something, staying put in the settled expectation that what is awaited will actually come.
This verb is built on the ordinary Greek verb for receiving or welcoming, and that is the picture behind it: someone holding a place open for what is on its way. Every New Testament use is about waiting. Paul sits in Athens waiting for his companions to catch up with him, and a farmer waits out the seasons for his crop.
What ties the uses together is not the waiting itself but the confidence inside it. This is never idle delay or killing time. The person waiting has good reason to think the arrival is certain, so the word carries patience and assurance at once. James puts it beside a word for long, uncomplaining endurance, and Hebrews uses it of a man who spent his whole life waiting for a city he never saw. What changes from verse to verse is only what is being awaited: a person walking up the road, or a promise still on its way.
Greek has a small family of words for waiting, and this one sits in the middle of it. The strengthened form (ἀπεκδέχομαι) adds a straining eagerness and is Paul's word for creation groaning for what is coming. Another word (προσδέχομαι) mixes waiting with a warm welcome for the one who arrives, and another (προσδοκάω) names the state of expecting something, whether with hope or with dread. Against those, this verb is the plain, steady one: stay where you are, because what you are waiting for is coming.
Nuances
Whether Paul tells the Corinthians to wait for one another before the meal begins, or to receive one another as a host receives guests.
- majorityThe verb has its usual New Testament sense of waiting for the others to arrive, which fits Paul's complaint that each one goes ahead with his own supper.; BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich), s.v. ἐκδέχομαι; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT)
- minorityThe verb here means to receive or entertain one another, a sense it carries in wider Greek usage, so Paul is addressing how the wealthier hosts treated their guests.; Bruce W. Winter, After Paul Left Corinth (2001); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC)
Whether the clause about waiting for the moving of the water belongs to the original text of John 5:3.
- majorityThe clause is a later explanatory addition, absent from the earliest and best manuscripts, and is omitted by the modern critical editions.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed.; Novum Testamentum Graece (Nestle-Aland), 28th ed.
- minorityThe clause belongs to the text and is retained in the Byzantine manuscript tradition followed by the Majority Text editions.; Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform (2005)