StrongerBible

lukos

λύκος

GreekG3074“wolf”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 7:15Mat 10:16Luk 10:3Jhn 10:12 (2×)Act 20:29
Root family
Akin to
Word studyLOO-kosnoun

What lukos means

wolf: the predator that carries off sheep, and so the standing picture of whoever preys on a defenseless flock

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

The wolf was the one animal a shepherd planned his day around. It hunts in packs, works the edges of dawn and dusk, and carries off what it kills, so an unguarded flock was a flock already lost. Every New Testament writer who reaches for this word is trading on that one fact, and none of them stops to explain it.

What is striking is that the word never reports a real animal on a real hillside. Even in the shepherd picture of John 10, the wolf belongs to the scene Jesus is drawing. The five uses fall into three settings:

  • the wolf whose approach exposes the hired man, who runs and leaves the sheep scattered
  • the wolves in whose midst Jesus knowingly sends his followers out, as defenseless as lambs
  • the wolves that get in among the flock, dressed as sheep or arriving once the shepherd is gone

That third setting is the sharp one. When the danger is outside, the flock at least knows where it stands. Matthew 7:15 and Acts 20:29 put the wolf inside, where it looks like one of the sheep or sounds like one of the leaders, so the warning is not about surviving an attack but about failing to see one coming.

Greek had other animals to insult people with, and each says something different. The dog (κύων) was the scavenger of the streets, so calling someone a dog meant unclean and beneath notice. The fox (ἀλώπηξ) meant sly and slight, which is how Jesus uses it of Herod. Among wild animals in general (θηρίον), the wolf is the one defined by what it does to livestock. It is not contemptible and it is not clever. It is simply lethal to whatever cannot defend itself, and hungry enough to come back.

Nuances

1athe animal itself, the predator whose arrival scatters an unguarded flock
Jhn 10:12 (2×)
1bhostile people, the surroundings into which Jesus sends his followers out unprotected
Mat 10:16Luk 10:3
1cpredators who get in among God's people, looking or sounding like part of the flock
Mat 7:15Act 20:29

What scholars say about lukos

BDAG divides the lemma into a literal sense (John 10:12) and a figurative extension used of persons of wolf-like character (Matthew 7:15; 10:16; Luke 10:3; Acts 20:29), while LSJ records the wolf as a standing Greek image of rapacity, carried by a family of proverbs and compounds well before the New Testament. The TDNT article organizes the New Testament material around the prophetic flock imagery of the Old Testament, and EDNT follows the same division. The decisive background is Septuagintal: the Greek Old Testament renders Hebrew zeeb with lykos throughout, and its phrase at Genesis 49:27, lykos harpax, is picked up verbatim at Matthew 7:15 as lykoi harpages, now inverted so that the raider is internal rather than a tribe's fighting strength (Muraoka, s.v.). Davies and Allison set Matthew 7:15 against the long prophetic tradition of warnings about false prophets and note how hard it is to identify the figures behind the polemic; Luz surveys the proposal that the sheep's clothing alludes to the prophet's mantle rather than to a literal garment. For Acts 20:29 the controlling imagery is Ezekiel 22:27 and Zephaniah 3:3, where Israel's own officials are wolves tearing prey, now applied to the future of the Ephesian church; the commentators divide over the relation of the wolves entering in v. 29 to the men arising from within in v. 30, Barrett and Bruce treating them as distinct external and internal threats and Keener reading the pair as one composite warning. In John 10:12 the wolf is deliberately unidentified, and Brown, Barrett and Michaels resist allegorizing it into a specific opponent, reading it instead as the standing threat that exposes the hireling, though the hireling itself has often been referred to the leadership criticized in John 9.

Sources

  • Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. lykoslexicon
  • Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), s.v. lykoslexicon
  • Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), vol. 4, art. lykostheological-dictionary
  • Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, eds., Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990-1993), s.v. lykostheological-dictionary
  • Takamitsu Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Louvain: Peeters, 2009), s.v. lykoslexicon
  • W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, ICC, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), on Matthew 7:15commentary
  • Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7, rev. ed., Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), on Matthew 7:15-20commentary
  • Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), on Matthew 10:16commentary
  • Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John I-XII, AB 29 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966), on John 10:11-13commentary
  • C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St John, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), on John 10:12commentary
  • J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), on John 10:12commentary
  • C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, ICC, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), on Acts 20:29-30commentary
  • F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), on Acts 20:29-30commentary
  • Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), on Acts 20:29-30commentary

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

All attested forms of λύκος

genitive m p

λύκων

Mat 10:16, Luk 10:3

nominative m p

λύκοι

Mat 7:15, Act 20:29

accusative m s

λύκον

Jhn 10:12

nominative m s

λύκος

Jhn 10:12