StrongerBible

makran

μακράν

GreekG3112“far off, far, ...”

Appears 11 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 8:30Mat 23:14Mrk 12:34Luk 7:6Luk 15:20Jhn 21:8Act 2:39Act 17:27Act 22:21Eph 2:13Eph 2:17
Root family
Word studyma-KRANadverb

What makran means

1

far off: at a distance from someone or something, whether the gap is measured in steps or in standing

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is the ordinary Greek word for being a long way off. It never fixes a distance of its own; it simply places one thing at a remove from another and lets the setting supply the scale. In John 21:8 the boat is not far from the shore, and the writer immediately says how far: about a hundred yards. In Luke 15:20 the son is still a long way off when his father spots him, and the distance is the whole point, because the father runs it.

The same word measures gaps nobody walks. A scribe who answers Jesus well is told he is not far from the kingdom of God (Mark 12:34), and Paul tells the Athenians that God is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:27). Nothing has moved in either case. What is being measured is standing, not steps.

Out of that grows a settled way of speaking. Isaiah promises peace to the far and to the near, and in Jewish usage after him "those far off" became a name for people outside the life Israel shared with God. Peter speaks that way at Pentecost (Acts 2:39), and Ephesians builds an argument on it: people who were once far off have been brought near, and the peace announced went to both the far and the near (ἐγγύς). Read as geography, those lines say almost nothing; read as standing, they say everything the letter is about.

Nuances

1aa distance you could pace off: far from a place, a person, or a shore
TranslatabilityDirect
Mat 8:30Luk 7:6Luk 15:20Jhn 21:8Act 22:21
1bfar from something you could belong to: distance in relationship rather than in steps
TranslatabilityDirect
Mrk 12:34Act 17:27
1cthe far ones: a standing name for people outside the circle of God's covenant people
Act 2:39Eph 2:13Eph 2:17
2

at length: drawn out over a long stretch of time

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyContested

In Matthew 23:14 the same spelling is doing a different job. The charge against the scribes is that they swallow up the houses of widows and, for a show, pray at length. What is being stretched out is time, not ground, and the root behind the word allows it: it covers anything drawn out, a long road or a long hour.

This one verse is a special case in another way. It is missing from the oldest Greek copies of Matthew and appears to have been carried over from the matching warnings in Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47, where the word is spelled as the plain adjective "long" rather than as this adverb. So the sense of stretched-out time rests on a single contested line, and it is kept apart from the "far off" meaning because no reader would guess it from the way the word behaves everywhere else.

Mat 23:14

What scholars say about makran

μακράν is the accusative singular feminine of the adjective μακρός used adverbially, with ὁδόν understood, a construction standard in classical Greek and continued through the Septuagint into the New Testament. BDAG and LSJ treat it as a fixed adverb of place and extent, "far (away), at a distance," with an extended use for those distant in relationship rather than in space. The εἰς μακράν of Acts 2:39 and the substantival τοῖς μακράν of Ephesians 2:13, 17 follow Septuagint idiom, above all Isaiah 57:19, which pairs those who are far with those who are near and supplies the text cited in Ephesians 2:17; Lincoln and Best both note that in later Jewish usage the far/near pair had become a conventional way of ranging Gentiles alongside Israel, which is why the Ephesian argument turns on it. Matthew 23:14 is text-critically secondary: the verse is absent from the earliest witnesses and is generally explained as assimilation to Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47, where the reading is the neuter plural μακρά with temporal force, so the temporal sense of the adverb rests on a disputed line and is weakly attested in the New Testament corpus.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. μακράνlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. μακρόςlexicon
  • Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, Word Biblical Commentary 42 (Dallas: Word Books, 1990)commentary
  • Ernest Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998)commentary
  • C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994)commentary
  • Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994)reference

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

All attested forms of μακράν

adv

μακρὰν, μακράν

Mat 8:30, Mat 23:14, Mrk 12:34, Luk 7:6, Luk 15:20, Jhn 21:8, Act 17:27, Act 22:21