StrongerBible

katakrēmnizō

κατακρημνίζω

GreekG2630“throw off the cliff, cast down headlong”

Appears 1 time · tap a cell to see the verses

Luk 4:29
Compound of
kataκατάaccording to484G2596
krēmnosκρημνόςcliff3G2911
Word studyResearch-gradekah-tah-krame-NEED-zoverb

What katakrēmnizō means

to hurl someone off a cliff: to send a person over the edge of a height so that the fall kills them

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word is built from the Greek noun for a cliff or steep bank (κρημνός) plus a prefix meaning "down." So it never means simply to push someone over or knock them flat. It means to send a person over an edge, and the fall is expected to be the end of them. Greek writers use it for captives thrown from the top of a rock, for men flung from ships, towers, and horses, and for criminals hurled from a height as punishment.

It appears once in the New Testament, at Luke 4:29, where the crowd in Nazareth drives Jesus out of the town, marches him to the edge of the hill it was built on, and means to throw him off. The Greek says only what they intended, "so as to throw him down," and the next sentence reports that Jesus passed through the middle of them and walked away. The word therefore describes an attempt that failed, and everything it implies about a deadly fall belongs to what the crowd meant to do, not to what happened.

What kind of act was intended is where scholars part ways. Many read it as a lynching: a killing improvised by an enraged crowd, with no trial, no witnesses, and no legal process, on a Sabbath when a sentence could not lawfully be carried out. Others hear behind it the Jewish penalty of stoning (λιθοβολέω), which later Jewish law describes as beginning with a push from a height, so that throwing Jesus down would be the opening move rather than the whole method. Either way, Luke sets the scene at the very start of Jesus' public work as a preview of what follows: the town that first admired him turns on him, and the rejection that ends at the cross is already in motion.

Luk 4:29
Luk 4:29

Whether the intended κατακρημνίσαι of Luke 4:29 is a spontaneous extra-judicial lynching or an echo of the Jewish penalty of stoning, whose opening stage was precipitation from a height as described in Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:4.

  • majorityAn improvised act of mob violence. Luke narrates no trial, no witnesses, and no legal procedure, v. 28 reports only that all in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and the episode falls on a Sabbath, when judicial punishment was not executed; precipitation was in any case not a recognized Jewish penalty in its own right.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1981), ad Luke 4:29; François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), ad Luke 4:29; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1991), ad Luke 4:29; Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to S. Luke, ICC (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1896), ad Luke 4:29
  • minorityAn echo of stoning by precipitation. The condemned is led outside the settlement to a predetermined height, matching the rabbinic account in which a witness pushes the condemned from a platform and stones follow only if the fall does not kill; the Mishnah is later evidence (codified around 200 CE) and idealized, so it is treated as suggestive background rather than proof of a fixed first-century rite.; I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), ad Luke 4:29; John Nolland, Luke 1:1-9:20, WBC 35A (Dallas: Word, 1989), ad Luke 4:29; Josef Blinzler, Der Prozess Jesu, 4th ed. (Regensburg: Pustet, 1969)

What scholars say about katakrēmnizō

κατακρημνίζω is a compound of κατά with a verb formed on κρημνός ("overhanging bank, precipice"), and the lexica are unanimous on its sense. LSJ gives (1) "throw down a precipice" (Philodemus, De ira; Plutarch, Marius 45 and Moralia 825b; Luke 4:29; LXX 2 Chronicles 25:12, with ἀπὸ τοῦ ἄκρου τοῦ κρημνοῦ; passives at Demosthenes 19.327 and Plutarch, Sulla 1; a perfect participle at Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.3.41) and (2) the more general "throw headlong down" (Xenophon, Hellenica 2.1.31, from triremes; Polybius 3.116.12, from horses; Diodorus Siculus 4.31, from a tower). BDAG defines it "to throw down from a cliff, throw down headlong," with Luke 4:29 as the sole NT instance; Thayer and Abbott-Smith agree, adding Philo, De agricultura 15, and Josephus, Antiquities 6.6.2 and 9.9.1 (the Amaziah episode); Louw and Nida file it under domain 15, "Linear Movement." In the Greek Old Testament the verb renders הִשְׁלִיךְ at 2 Chronicles 25:12 and appears at 2 Maccabees 12:15 (of Jericho's walls) and 14:43 (Razis casting himself down), while 2 Maccabees 6:10 uses the simplex κρημνίζω, a distinction worth noting when consulting Hatch and Redpath. In Luke 4:29 the construction is ὥστε with the aorist infinitive κατακρημνίσαι, expressing intended result, and v. 30 (διελθὼν διὰ μέσου αὐτῶν ἐπορεύετο) makes the attempt abortive, so the question whether the verb of itself entails death does not arise in Luke. The live exegetical debate concerns the character of the intended act: Fitzmyer, Bovon, Johnson, Garland, and Plummer read spontaneous extra-judicial violence (no trial, no witnesses, a Sabbath setting, and precipitation not being a Jewish penalty in its own right), while Marshall, Nolland, and Craddock, drawing on Blinzler, hear the precipitation-then-stoning procedure of Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:4, with due caution about its later date and idealizing character. A separate and largely independent line (Tannehill, Green, Conzelmann, Busse, and Prevallet) treats Luke 4:16 to 30 as programmatic, with ἐξέβαλον αὐτὸν ἔξω τῆς πόλεως echoed at Luke 20:15 and Acts 7:58, so that the failed κατακρημνίσαι prefigures a death that will occur only in Jerusalem at the appointed hour. The Greco-Roman practice of precipitation (the Tarpeian Rock, the Athenian barathron, the Spartan Kaiadas) supplies punitive resonance without making the Nazareth episode a judicial act. The text of the verse is stable: ὥστε κατακρημνίσαι αὐτόν is attested in Papyrus 4, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Bezae with no significant variant, and the topographical objection (modern Nazareth sits in a basin; Jebel al-Qafzeh is a Byzantine devotional localization) is answered variously by appeal to the genuine drops on the rim of the ancient site or by reading the ὀφρύς theologically.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG (Bauer, Danker, Arndt, Gingrich), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. κατακρημνίζωlexicon
  • Liddell, Scott, Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), s.v. κατακρημνίζωlexicon
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), s.v. κατακρημνίζωlexicon
  • J. Lust, E. Eynikel, K. Hauspie, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2003), s.v. κατακρημνίζωlexicon
  • Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1989), domain 15lexicon
  • Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1981), ad Luke 4:29commentary
  • I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), ad Luke 4:29commentary
  • John Nolland, Luke 1:1-9:20, WBC 35A (Dallas: Word, 1989), ad Luke 4:29commentary
  • François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), ad Luke 4:16-30commentary
  • Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), ad Luke 4:16-30commentary
  • Josef Blinzler, Der Prozess Jesu, 4th ed. (Regensburg: Pustet, 1969)monograph
  • Robert C. Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986)monograph
  • Edwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath, A Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897)concordance

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

All attested forms of κατακρημνίζω

aorist active infinitive

κατακρημνίσαι

Luk 4:29