lambanō

BDAG divides the verb into two primary senses, getting hold of something by grasping it and taking something into one's possession (receive, accept, get), an architecture the older lexica of Thayer and Abbott-Smith share and LSJ documents across classical and Hellenistic Greek; Louw and Nida deliberately distribute the senses across separate semantic domains (grasp, receive, collect, catch, choose) rather than treating the word as one undifferentiated gloss. Moulton and Milligan document the Hellenistic future λήμψομαι directly from the papyri and from Lycian inscriptions, confirming that the New Testament spelling is ordinary commercial Koine and not a biblical peculiarity; the intruded mu drops out in later manuscripts under literary influence, which is why editors regularly note a λήμψομαι/λήψομαι split. Danove's valency and case-frame studies treat λαμβάνω as a verb of transference and, in its noun collocations, as a light or support verb whose meaning is carried by the noun and the construction: on that analysis the question whether it "really means" take or receive in a given verse is often malformed. Most of the collocations (συμβούλιον λαμβάνω, itself a Latinism for consilium capere; ἀρχὴν λαμβάνω; πεῖραν λαμβάνω; ὑπόμνησιν λαμβάνω) have good classical and Koine parallels, but πρόσωπον λαμβάνειν is a Semitism calqued on נשא פנים, already present in the Septuagint (Leviticus 19:15; Malachi 1:8) and reversed in sense from favour to partiality; the abstract προσωπολημψία is unattested in classical Greek and appears first in the New Testament, with Bassler tracing Paul's use of divine impartiality as a theological axiom and Faber arguing for a retained juridical nuance. Barr's critique of illegitimate totality transfer, extended by Silva and Carson, bears directly on this verb: the traditional contrast with δέχομαι is real as a tendency yet frequently overdrawn. In the disputed clusters the verb is not the pivot: Spirit-reception is argued between Dunn's conversion-initiation reading and the Lukan empowerment readings of Stronstad, Menzies and Turner, with Fee and Barrett mediating; the Philippians 2:7 debate concerns whether λαβών states the means of the self-emptying, which Fee, O'Brien, Hofius and Martin's history of the hymn's interpretation affirm; the tradition-transmission argument between Gerhardsson and Neusner, with Byrskog and Bauckham mediating, concerns the compound παραλαμβάνω rather than the simple verb; and in Revelation, Aune notes the vivid aoristic perfect εἴληφεν at 5:7 while Aune, Beale and Koester read the χάραγμα of 13:16 to 14:11 against branding and imperial seals, with the horror residing in the object rather than in a neutral "receive".