to flog: to beat someone with a whip as a punishment ordered by someone in authority
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
This verb is built on the noun for a whip (μάστιξ), and it never strays far from that picture. It does not describe a scuffle or a beating with fists. It means a lash laid on a person's back, deliberately, by someone with the standing to order it: a council, a governor, an officer with a prisoner already tied down.
The New Testament puts it in three settings, and a reader gains a great deal by keeping them apart:
Jewish councils could sentence an offender to a public lashing, and Jesus warned his followers they would take one in the synagogues.
Roman officers used the whip both to force a confession out of a prisoner and as the standard beating that came just before a crucifixion.
Hebrews turns the same picture toward God, who whips every son he welcomes.
That last use is not a softening. Hebrews is quoting the ancient Greek translation of Proverbs 3:12, where this word stands beside the broader verb for training and correcting a child (παιδεύω). Set side by side, the two say something the gentler word alone would not: God's correction of his children is real pain, felt as a blow, and it falls on sons he has accepted rather than on enemies he is destroying.
Nuances
1aa court-ordered lashing in a synagogue: the beating a local Jewish assembly could hand down as a legal penalty
Mat 10:17Mat 23:34
1ba Roman flogging: the whipping an officer or a governor inflicted on a prisoner, either to force information out of him or as the beating that came just before execution
Mat 20:19Mrk 10:34Luk 18:33Jhn 19:1*Act 22:25
1cGod's painful correction of a child he has welcomed as his own
TranslatabilityPartial
Heb 12:6
Related words
The English words used to translate mastigoō
“flog”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
always names the whipping itself, never a fine, a prison term, or some other penaltyLuk 18:33
Both
both describe a penalty imposed on someone by an authorityMat 23:34
Only punish
a general English word covering any penalty at all, so it hides which one was actually carried out
“whip”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How mastigoō differs from similar Greek words
φραγελλόωa borrowed Latin word for the particular Roman flogging a governor ordered before a crucifixion, where this word is the ordinary Greek term for whipping of any kind
Covers whippings handed down by local Jewish assemblies, not just by Rome, so it names a punishment a community could inflict on its own members.Mat 10:17Mat 23:34
This is the word chosen when a beating is spoken of ahead of time, in the warnings about what would be done to Jesus, rather than in the report of the act itself.Mat 20:19Mrk 10:34Luk 18:33
It stretches into a picture of God correcting the children he loves, where the whipping stands for painful discipline that comes from care rather than cruelty.Heb 12:6
Both
Both name a beating with a whip inflicted as a legal punishment, and English Bibles render either one as "scourge" or "flog".Jhn 19:1Mrk 15:15
Both are used of the very same event, the whipping of Jesus while Pilate held him, with different writers reaching for different words for it.Jhn 19:1Mat 27:26
Both of its uses name the Roman governor's own act. The word is borrowed straight out of Latin for the Roman military whipping, so it points at that one official punishment rather than at beatings in general.Mat 27:26Mrk 15:15
It never stands as a punishment complete in itself: in both places the whipping is the step taken just before Jesus is handed over to be crucified.Mat 27:26Mrk 15:15
δέρωto thrash or beat someone up, with fists or a stick and often at the hands of a mob, rather than the measured lashing by legal order that this word names
The whip is built into the word, so the punishment is the lash and not fists, as when Pilate had Jesus flogged.Jhn 19:1
Is the standard step before a Roman execution, listed in one breath with the mocking and the crucifixion that follow it.Mat 20:19Mrk 10:34Luk 18:33
Becomes a picture of God correcting the children he loves, so the harsher of the two words carries the one hopeful use.Heb 12:6
Both
Both name the flogging handed out in synagogues, and the warnings to followers of Jesus use one word or the other with no real change in force.Mrk 13:9Act 22:19Mat 10:17
Both describe what people do to the messengers God keeps sending them, beating some and whipping others.Mrk 12:3Mat 23:34
Both are punishment ordered by a ruling authority and carried out on a prisoner already in custody, whether by the council in Jerusalem or by the governor.Act 5:40Jhn 19:1
Names the blow without naming what it was struck with, so it stretches from a single slap in the face at a hearing to a long thrashing by a squad of guards.Jhn 18:23Luk 22:63
Fits a beating that can be counted out, so for the same failure one servant receives many blows and another only a few.Luk 12:47Luk 12:48
Reaches past real violence into a picture, describing a boxer whose punches land on nothing but air.1Co 9:26
Covers ordinary personal violence with no court or sentence behind it, the sort a bully uses on the people he is already taking advantage of.2Co 11:20
παιδεύωto train and correct a person, a broad word running all the way from schooling a child to punishing an offender, where this word names only the blow
Names only the physical act of flogging with a whip, a violent judicial punishment: Pilate scourging Jesus, and the foretold mocking and scourging.Jhn 19:1Mat 20:19
Describes persecution, where synagogue authorities flog Christ's messengers.Mat 10:17Mat 23:34
Both
Both can describe corrective bodily punishment. Hebrews sets them in parallel, that the Lord disciplines and scourges the son he loves, and the wider word can itself mean an ordered flogging.Heb 12:6Luk 23:16
Means to raise and educate, forming the mind and character: Moses schooled in all the learning of Egypt, and Paul trained up in the law.Act 7:22Act 22:3
Covers moral training and correction aimed at repentance rather than at pain: grace training believers to live godly lives, and gently correcting opponents.Tit 2:122Ti 2:25
Names God's fatherly discipline of his own children for their lasting good.Heb 12:7Rev 3:19
mastigoō in the other biblical languages
נָכָהHebrew“to smite”the broad Hebrew verb for striking someone, which the ancient Greek translators most often rendered with this word; it covers any blow, from a slap to a killing stroke, while this word means a whipping in particular
This word names the instrument as well as the act: a beating laid on with a whip, not a blow of the hand, a stone, or a sword. Pilate has Jesus taken away and whipped, and the soldiers' mockery in the passion predictions turns on the lash.Jhn 19:1Mrk 10:34
It never names the blow that kills. The whipping is one step in a sequence, and the death that follows is always described with a different word, so the beating and the execution stay separate acts.Mat 20:19Luk 18:33Mrk 10:34
Every use sits inside a formal proceeding: people are handed over to councils, dragged into meeting places, or delivered to foreign rulers, and the whipping is what those bodies do to them. There is no casual or private beating here.Mat 10:17Mat 23:34
Both
Both describe a lashing handed down as a legal sentence. Israel's law has the judge make a guilty man lie down and take his measured number of stripes, and Greek translators reached for this Greek verb to render that Hebrew one, which is the same act Jesus warns his followers will face in the local meeting places.Deu 25:2Deu 25:3Mat 10:17
Both are used for a corrective beating given by someone who loves the one being beaten, where the pain is meant to train rather than destroy: a father with a rod in Proverbs, and God with every son he receives in Hebrews.Pro 23:13Pro 23:14Heb 12:6
The Hebrew word covers striking of any degree, from one man hitting another in a quarrel to a blow that kills on the spot. Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, then strikes the Egyptian dead, and the same verb carries both.Exo 2:11Exo 2:121Ki 22:24
It is the ordinary word for defeating an army or a whole people in battle, where no individual blow is in view at all.Gen 14:5Gen 14:7Num 21:24
God is often the one who strikes, sending plague, hail, and death across a land, so the word reaches far beyond anything a person could do with a whip.Exo 12:12Exo 12:29Exo 9:25
It can strike a thing rather than a person, as when Moses hits the rock with his staff to bring out water.Exo 17:6Num 20:11
Variants
The same word in another spelling or form.
μαστίζω“to whip”The verb mastizo is the same verb in an older poetic form, and it means exactly what mastigoo means: to flog someone with a whip. Greek writers of the classical Athenian period preferred mastigoo, while mastizo belonged to poetry and to later prose, and the two were used interchangeably for the same act. It surfaces just once in the New Testament, when Paul asks the officer holding him down whether it is lawful to flog a Roman citizen who has not been condemned. Because it is not a different word but a different form of one word, it is studied together with mastigoo.
What scholars say about mastigoō
The lexica are unanimous on the verb's sense and divide it only by application: BDAG gives (1) to beat with a whip, flog, scourge, and (2) to punish with discipline, chastise, citing Hebrews 12:6 for the second, while LSJ documents the same literal sense from classical Attic prose onward alongside the epic and later-prose form μαστίζω that stands at Acts 22:25. In the Septuagint the verb renders Hebrew נכה in the causative stem more often than anything else, which places it in the field of judicial beating governed by Deuteronomy 25:1-3, where a guilty man is beaten in the judge's presence under a capped number of strokes; the rabbinic regulation of that penalty at thirty-nine strokes (Mishnah, Makkot 3:10-14) is the background both to 2 Corinthians 11:24 and to the synagogue floggings of Matthew 10:17 and 23:34. On the Roman side the discussion turns on the three grades of beating attested in Roman practice, the light fustigatio (a caning), the more severe flagellatio, and the verberatio that regularly preceded crucifixion. Raymond Brown's treatment in The Death of the Messiah argues that John 19:1, standing before the sentence rather than after it and read beside Luke 23:16 and 23:22, describes the lighter beating Pilate hoped would satisfy the crowd, whereas others take it as the standard pre-crucifixion scourging narrated out of sequence; Keener surveys both readings. Hebrews 12:6 quotes Proverbs 3:12 in its Greek form, where the verb diverges from the Masoretic text's reference to a father and the son he delights in, apparently reflecting a different construal of the same consonants; Attridge and other commentators on Hebrews treat the Greek form as the text the author knew and argued from.
Sources
BDAG, s.v. μαστιγόωlexicon
Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. μαστιγόω, μαστίζωlexicon
T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Peeters, 2009), s.v. μαστιγόωlexicon
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), s.v. μάστιξ, μαστιγόω, μαστίζωtheological-dictionary
Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols. (Anchor Bible Reference Library; Doubleday, 1994)monograph
Josef Blinzler, Der Prozess Jesu, 4th ed. (Pustet, 1969)monograph
Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Hendrickson, 2003)commentary
Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1989)commentary