entellō

The lexica agree closely on the core sense. BDAG defines the verb as "to give an authoritative order, command, order, give orders," noting constructions typical of the New Testament, including the covenantal idiom of commanding a covenant (Hebrews 9:20). LSJ treats the active as a poetic rarity and the verb as effectively deponent from Herodotus on, and flags a later documentary sense "to invest with legal powers, authorize to act." Louw-Nida place it in the domain of command and order (33.329); Muraoka and LEH give the same core for the Septuagint and key it to the causative Hebrew verb. Gottlob Schrenk (TDNT 2:544-556) stresses that the word connotes not just any imperative but the commissioning of a task the charged party is expected to complete. The decisive development is in the Septuagint, where the verb became the near-mechanical rendering of the piel of the Hebrew verb tsavah, a stereotyped equivalence noted by Tov, Aejmelaeus, and Wevers as diagnostic of the Pentateuch's translation technique; this saturated the Greek word with the resonance of Sinai. The New Testament then exploits that resonance: Matthew places the verb on the risen Jesus's lips (28:20) in echo of Moses, a christological escalation weighed by Davies-Allison, Luz, France, Nolland, and Hagner; Hebrews 9:20 deliberately rewrites the Septuagint of Exodus 24:8 to make the Sinai covenant sound like a divine command (Attridge, Ellingworth, Lane); and Acts 1:2 uses the participle for the risen Lord's commissioning of the apostles (Barrett, Bruce, Keener). John's use in 14:31 and 15:12-17 is the site of the liveliest disagreement, though it concerns theological register rather than the lexical sense: Brown, Bultmann, Barrett, Carson, Keener, Thompson, and Lincoln converge in rejecting a "new Torah" reading while dividing over the symmetry of the friendship and the ground of the command's newness.