to escape: to get all the way out of something that had a hold on you, and end up clear of it
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
This verb is the ordinary Greek word for running away (φεύγω) with a prefix on the front meaning "out of." The prefix does the work. Where the plain verb pictures the running, this one pictures the result: not the dash for the door but the standing clear on the other side, out of reach.
Three of its eight uses are ordinary, physical, and set in a real place:
prisoners who are assumed to have gotten out of an open jail
two men who make it out of a house after a violent beating
Paul lowered through a window in a basket, out of the reach of the hands closing on him
The other five turn that picture toward the future and ask whether anyone can get clear of what God has said is coming. Paul asks a man who judges others whether he really expects to slip out of God's verdict. He tells the Thessalonians that the people saying "peace and safety" will not get out from under what falls on them. Hebrews asks twice how anyone could get clear after refusing the God who is speaking. Jesus tells his followers to stay awake and pray so they will have the strength to come through all of it.
That is why the word so often carries a "not" or sits inside a question that already knows its answer. It does not name a narrow squeak that could go either way. It names the getting out completed, which is exactly what makes it so heavy when a writer says it will not happen.
Nuances
1ato get bodily clear of a place or of someone holding you
Act 16:27Act 19:162Co 11:33
1bto get clear of a punishment or a disaster that is coming
puts all the weight on getting out and clear of something that had a grip on you, not on the runningAct 19:162Co 11:33
is used again and again of getting out from under a judgment that is on its way, usually to say that nobody willRom 2:31Th 5:3Heb 2:3
Both
both name coming safely out of a confinement or a threat that was already upon youAct 16:27Heb 12:25
Only escape
in everyday English "escape" can mean merely avoiding something you never actually faced, as in escaping notice or escaping the washing up, which is far lighter than getting out of a real danger
English "escape" also covers gas or water leaking out of a container, a use the Greek word does not have
“flee out”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
“get away”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How ekpheugō differs from similar Greek words
φεύγωthe plain verb for running away, which pictures the flight itself rather than the safe arrival on the other side
Names the successful outcome of getting away: to escape, to slip clear of a danger that had a hold on you. The stress falls on making it out safely, not on the act of running.Act 16:27Act 19:162Co 11:33
Often used for escaping a judgment or a fate rather than a person: the question is whether anyone can get clear of what is coming, and the answer is usually no.Rom 2:31Th 5:3Heb 2:3Heb 12:25
Both
Both describe getting away from mortal danger, and both can be used of survivors who lived through a disaster; the difference is only whether the focus is the flight (flee) or the safe outcome (escape).2Co 11:33Heb 11:34
Names the act of running away itself: to flee, to take flight from a threat, whether or not you get clear. It pictures the flight, not the safe arrival.Mat 2:13Mat 24:16Mrk 14:50
Used for turning and running from a person or an enemy, and figuratively for running away from a sin or temptation you must not stay near.Jhn 10:51Co 6:181Co 10:142Ti 2:22
ἀποφεύγωthe near twin used in 2 Peter for getting away from the rot of the world, which pictures leaving a corrupting influence behind rather than slipping out of a danger
It does plain, bodily escapes in real places: prisoners thought to have gotten out of an open jail, two men who make it out of a house beaten and stripped, and Paul lowered through a window in a basket, out of the reach of the hands closing on him.Act 16:27Act 19:162Co 11:33
It is the word for getting out from under a punishment that is on its way, and it nearly always carries a "no" or sits in a question that already knows its answer: the man who judges others will not slip past God's verdict, the people saying "peace and safety" will not get clear, and those who turn away from the one speaking have no way out.Rom 2:31Th 5:3Heb 2:3Heb 12:25
It can also name coming safely through everything that is about to happen and standing before the Son of Man, which is what Jesus tells his followers to stay awake and pray for.Luk 21:36
Both
Both mean getting all the way clear of something that had a hold on you, not just the running itself: each one reports a person out and free of the thing named.2Pe 2:202Co 11:33
Both point at what was escaped rather than where the person went, so the sentence tells you what had its grip on them: the rot of the world in one case, God's verdict in the other.2Pe 1:4Rom 2:3
What this word leaves behind is always moral rot rather than a physical danger: the decay that runaway desire works in the world, and the filth of the world that a person walks away from.2Pe 1:42Pe 2:20
It can describe an escape that does not hold. Peter uses it of people who have only barely gotten away from a crowd living in error and are being lured back with promises, and of people who get tangled up again in the very things they left and end up worse off than before.2Pe 2:182Pe 2:20
The way out it names is a changed life: getting clear happens through God's promises, and through coming to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, not by a run for the door or a lucky break.2Pe 1:42Pe 2:20
διαφεύγωthe rarer word for making it through and out the far side of a peril, used of swimming ashore from a wreck
Most often what is escaped is not a place at all but something coming at you: a judgment, a sudden ruin, a reckoning you cannot outrun. This is where the majority of its uses sit, and it is the note the New Testament writers lean on hardest.Rom 2:3Heb 2:31Th 5:3Luk 21:36Heb 12:25
When it is a physical escape, the attention stays on the place or the grip a person gets out of, and the sentence usually names it: out of that house, out of the governor's hands.Act 19:162Co 11:33
Both
Both describe a prisoner or a hunted person getting away from the people holding him, and English Bibles render both with the same word, "escape". In each scene the fear is the same: the guards will be left with an empty cell or an empty ship.Act 27:42Act 16:27
Pictures the getaway carried all the way through: a man slips past the people holding him and is gone for good, out of reach rather than merely out the door. On the sinking ship the soldiers are not worried that a prisoner will leave the deck, since everyone is about to be in the water; they are worried that one will swim clear and never be recovered.Act 27:42
σῴζωthe word for being saved or rescued, which names someone stepping in to deliver you, where this word simply reports that you got clear
The person in danger gets clear under their own power, moving out and away from the place where the threat is. The picture is physical distance opening up between someone and what could destroy them: a man bolting out of a house, a prisoner slipping the jailer's custody, Paul lowered through a window in the city wall and out of the governor's reach.Act 19:16Act 16:272Co 11:33
Its most common setting is a warning, phrased as a challenge or a flat denial, that certain people will not get away from what is coming. The word usually arrives with a negative attached: no, they will not slip out from under God's verdict.Rom 2:31Th 5:3Heb 2:3Heb 12:25
It reports only that the danger was avoided and says nothing about the person's condition afterward. Luke keeps the two apart: getting clear of all that is coming is one thing, and standing before the Son of Man is named separately as another. Those who get out of the house in Acts get out stripped and wounded.Luk 21:36Act 19:16
Both
Both describe coming through an immediate, life-threatening situation alive. Paul gets out of Damascus with his life, and the sailors are told they cannot come through the shipwreck alive unless the crew stays aboard.2Co 11:33Act 27:31
Both are used of surviving God's judgment, approaching the same moment from opposite sides: one asks whether a person will get clear of the verdict, the other says the rescue is done for them and is barely managed even for the person who is in the right.Rom 2:3Rom 5:91Pe 4:18
Someone else does the rescuing. The person in trouble is helpless and cries out for a rescuer to act, or watches every hope of rescue disappear, rather than making their own way out.Mat 8:25Mat 14:30Act 27:20
It covers being made well from sickness, which is why English Bibles often render it "healed" or "made you well" in the healing stories. A bleeding woman, a blind beggar, a grateful leper, and a bedridden believer are all described with this one word.Mrk 5:34Mrk 10:52Luk 17:19Jas 5:15
It carries the settled religious sense of being rescued from sin and brought into lasting life with God. This is the word Jesus is named for, the one Peter uses when he says rescue is found in no other name, and the one Paul uses for a gift received rather than earned.Mat 1:21Act 4:12Eph 2:8
ekpheugō in the other biblical languages
מָלַטHebrew“to escape”the usual Hebrew verb for slipping away with your life intact, the closest counterpart in the Old Testament
The one who gets out is always the subject. In the New Testament this verb never describes pulling somebody else clear, so it is never rendered "deliver" or "rescue"; it only ever reports that a person came out from under something.Act 16:27Act 19:16Rom 2:3
Its heaviest uses look past any danger inside history to the last day and God's final verdict: staying awake so as to stand before the Son of Man, the destruction that lands on people saying "peace and safety", and the question of getting clear after refusing the God who is speaking.Luk 21:361Th 5:3Heb 12:25
Both
Both are the plain word for a bodily getaway from people who mean to kill or hold you, and both are used of a man let down through a window and away. The Greek word is the New Testament's usual way of saying what the Hebrew word says all through the Old.1Sa 19:121Sa 23:132Co 11:33Act 19:16
Both move from a physical getaway to getting out from under a punishment God has announced, and in both languages the sentence is usually a denial or a question that already knows its answer: no one will get clear.Amo 9:1Jer 48:8Rom 2:3Heb 2:3
It turns the other way round just as easily and means getting someone else out: saving a life, carrying valuables to safety, sparing a city. English needs a second word, "deliver" or "rescue", where Hebrew keeps one.1Ki 1:12Job 29:12Psa 107:20Isa 31:5
God is regularly the one doing the getting out, and this is the word people use when they cry to him for it. Nobody in the New Testament asks God for the Greek word's action; here it is a prayer.Psa 22:5Psa 116:4Isa 46:4Jol 2:32
It stretches to birth, where something slips out of the body into the world: a mother bringing forth a child before the labor pains arrive, and a bird laying and hatching her eggs. The Greek word has no such use.Isa 66:7Isa 34:15
It is the working word of Old Testament narrative, and especially of the lone survivor who gets away from a slaughter and arrives with the news.Job 1:15Job 1:162Sa 1:31Sa 30:17
פָּלַטHebrew“to escape”the Hebrew verb for coming out of danger safely, often with the sense of being brought out by someone else
The one doing the escaping is always the person in danger. This word pictures someone getting himself out of a place or out of a grip, and it never names a rescuer who does it for him: prisoners assumed to have slipped their cell, Paul lowered through a window in a basket and away from the governor's reach.Act 16:272Co 11:33
Most of its uses are warnings about the day God settles accounts, and the expected answer is that nobody gets away. It shows up in questions asked so the answer can be no, and in flat statements that there will be no way out.1Th 5:3Heb 2:3Heb 12:25Luk 21:36
Both
Both words cover a person coming through a deadly situation alive and getting clear of it, and English Bibles render both "escape": survivors slipping away to the hills after a city falls, men bolting out of a house battered and stripped.Ezk 7:16Act 19:16
Both can describe walking away free from a sentence. Job is sure that if he could only reach the court he would come away cleared, and Paul asks whether a person who judges others really thinks he will come away clear when God judges.Job 23:7Rom 2:3
The one doing the work is usually somebody else, and most often God himself, so the word becomes a name for him: he is the one who gets his people out, "my deliverer". Mockers can even throw the word back at a sufferer, daring God to come and do it.Psa 18:22Sa 22:2Psa 144:2Psa 40:17Psa 22:8
It is the standard word of the plea. Someone in trouble asks God, or asks those who judge, to pull a victim out of the hands that hold him, which is a request no Greek speaker could make with the New Testament word for escaping.Psa 17:13Psa 31:1Psa 43:1Psa 71:4Psa 82:4
It also reaches past rescue to the plain idea of bringing something out safely, with no threat to the one carrying it: a lion getting its kill clear away, a cow bringing her calf safely into the world, goods a person tries to salvage and cannot.Isa 5:29Job 21:10Mic 6:14
What scholars say about ekpheugō
The compound is transparent: ἐκ plus φεύγω, attested from classical prose onward with the perfective force the prefix supplies, so that it denotes not the act of fleeing but its successful completion. BDAG divides the New Testament uses into an intransitive "escape, run away" (Acts 16:27; 19:16) and a transitive use with an accusative object naming the peril escaped (Rom 2:3;2 Cor 11:33;Heb 2:3; 12:25), a division the morphology of the eight occurrences supports. LSJ records the same range in classical Greek along with a further sense of a word or fact escaping a person's notice, which the New Testament does not use. Five of the eight occurrences stand in eschatological or judicial contexts, and in Hebrews the verb twice carries the argument from lesser to greater: those who refused the earthly warning did not escape (12:25), and neglect of a greater salvation leaves no escape (2:3). Attridge and Ellingworth both treat ἐκφεύξομεθα in Heb 2:3 as governing an implied object of judgment rather than of salvation, the rhetorical question presupposing a negative answer. In 1 Thess 5:3 the emphatic double negative οὐ μή with the subjunctive marks the impossibility of escape rather than its improbability.
Sources
BDAG, s.v. ἐκφεύγωlexicon
LSJ, s.v. ἐκφεύγωlexicon
Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (EDNT), s.v. ἐκφεύγωtheological-dictionary
Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989)commentary
Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993)commentary