StrongerBible

metōpon

μέτωπον

GreekG3359“forehead”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Rev 7:3Rev 9:4Rev 13:16Rev 14:1Rev 14:9Rev 17:5Rev 20:4Rev 22:4
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeMEH-toh-ponnoun

What metōpon means

the forehead: the bare stretch of a person's face above the eyes

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is an everyday Greek word built from two pieces, "between" and "eye", so it says literally the space between the eyes. Greek writers used it of people and of animals, and they also stretched it to mean the front of a thing: the face of a wall, the brow of a mountain, the front line of an army drawn up for battle. The New Testament never uses it that way. All eight of its appearances mean a person's actual forehead, and every one of them falls in the book of Revelation.

That concentration is not an accident. In the ancient world the forehead was where the invisible was made visible, because it is the one part of a person that cannot be covered or turned away. Slaves and captives were marked there, and so were the devotees of certain temples. Israel's high priest wore a gold plate on his brow engraved "Holy to the LORD". The Hebrew word for the forehead (מֵצַח) carries the same freight: a forehead of bronze belongs to someone past shame, and in Ezekiel a man dressed in linen walks through Jerusalem marking the foreheads of everyone who grieves over the city so that the destroyers will pass them by.

Revelation picks all of this up and hangs the shape of the whole book on it. Four different things get written on foreheads:

  • God's servants are sealed on their foreheads before judgment falls, and the swarm that follows may not touch them.
  • The beast forces everyone to take its stamp on the right hand or the forehead in order to buy and sell.
  • The seal turns out to be a name, the Lamb's name and his Father's, worn by the redeemed.
  • Babylon writes her own title on her own forehead.

By the final chapter the pattern closes: God's servants see his face (πρόσωπον) and his name is on their foreheads. In this book nobody's forehead is left blank. Everyone belongs to someone, and it shows.

Rev 7:3Rev 9:4Rev 13:16Rev 14:1Rev 14:9Rev 17:5Rev 20:4Rev 22:4

Disputed

Whether the marks Revelation places on the forehead are symbolic tokens of allegiance or physical inscriptions on skin.

  • majorityBoth the seal on God's servants and the beast's counterfeit stamp are symbolic. Since the seal on believers is never said to be visible, the mark that parodies it is not physical either.; G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 1999), 715; Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation (NICNT, rev. 1997), 261-262; Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (BECNT, 2002), on 13:16; Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (T&T Clark, 1993), 384-452
  • minorityThe beast's mark is a literal, physical mark imposed during a future period of tribulation.; John F. Walvoord, The Revelation of Jesus Christ (Moody, 1966), on 13:16; Robert L. Thomas, Revelation 8-22: An Exegetical Commentary (Moody, 1995), on 13:16

What scholars say about metōpon

The lexicons converge on a two-tier range. LSJ separates the literal brow, the space between the eyes (Homer, Il. 13.615; Aristotle, HA 491b12, τὸ μεταξὺ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν, μέτωπον), from a metaphorical "front" used of walls, headlands and above all of an army's frontage (Xenophon, Cyr. 2.4.2-4; Polybius 1.33.6; Herodotus 1.178); Louw-Nida 8.12 simply files the word in the body-part domain. BDAG compresses its entry because New Testament usage is exclusively literal and confined to Revelation. Carl Schneider (TDNT IV, 635-637) arranges the evidence under profane Greek, Old Testament and Jewish, and New Testament headings, and argues that Revelation's forehead imagery is Jewish-apocalyptic in root while operating within a Greco-Roman hinterland of slave-branding and cultic tattooing; EDNT treats the word inside the sealing vocabulary alongside σφραγίς and χάραγμα. Moulton-Milligan and Spicq gather the documentary evidence for marks ἐν τῷ μετώπῳ, including Ptolemaic runaway-slave notices and the Epidaurus healing inscription (IG IV² 1, 121.48). Behind the New Testament usage lies the Septuagint's steady equivalence with מֵצַח (BDB 594; HALOT s.v.), which supplies three Old Testament complexes: the high priest's inscribed plate as a signet of divine ownership (Exod 28:36-38; Propp, Exodus 19-40, ad loc.), the hard or brazen forehead of the shameless (Isa 48:4; Jer 3:3; Ezek 3:7-9), and the marking of the righteous remnant with a tāw in Ezek 9:4, which Greenberg, Block and Zimmerli read as YHWH's autograph of ownership. Psalms of Solomon 15:6-9, with its paired mark of God and mark of destruction ἐπὶ τοῦ μετώπου, is the closest pre-Christian analogue to Revelation's antithesis. On the Apocalypse itself, Beale, Mounce, Osborne, Koester and Bauckham read the seal of Rev 7:3 as a mark of ownership and protection later decoded as the divine Name (14:1; 22:4), with the beast's χάραγμα as its deliberate parody and the forehead-plus-hand pairing echoing the tefillin commands of Deut 6:8 and 11:18 (Cohn, Tangled Up in Text, on the Hellenistic origins of the practice). Aune's excursus on marking, branding and tattooing (WBC 52B, 2:456-459) presses the documentary background harder than most, and C. P. Jones established that στίγμα language denotes tattooing rather than hot-iron branding of humans. On Rev 17:5, Aune (WBC 52C, 935-937) shows that the widely repeated claim about name labels on the foreheads of Roman prostitutes rests on Seneca's titulus posted above the door of the cubicle (Contr. 1.2.1) rather than on the woman herself, so contemporary specialists read the verse chiefly as an inversion of the high priestly plate and of the sealed foreheads of 14:1.

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

  • LSJ, s.v. μέτωπονlexicon
  • BDAG, s.v. μέτωπονlexicon
  • J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 8.12lexicon
  • Carl Schneider, "μέτωπον," TDNT IV, 635-637dictionary
  • H. Balz and G. Schneider (eds.), Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 2, s.v. μέτωπονdictionary
  • C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, vol. 2, s.v. μέτωπονlexicon
  • J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. μέτωπονlexicon
  • BDB, Hebrew and English Lexicon, s.v. מֵצַח, 594lexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. מֵצַחlexicon
  • G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 1999), 409-423, 715-716, 1112-1116commentary
  • Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation (NICNT, rev. 1997), 167, 261-262commentary
  • David E. Aune, Revelation 6-16 (WBC 52B, 1998), Excursus 7A, 2:456-459commentary
  • David E. Aune, Revelation 17-22 (WBC 52C, 1998), 935-937commentary
  • Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (BECNT, 2002)commentary
  • Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (T&T Clark, 1993), 217-229, 384-452monograph
  • Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (AB 22, 1983), 176-177commentary
  • Daniel I. Block, Ezekiel 1-24 (NICOT, 1997), 306-307commentary
  • William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19-40 (AYB 2A; Yale, 2006), on 28:36-38commentary
  • C. P. Jones, "Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity," JRS 77 (1987) 139-155article
  • Yehudah B. Cohn, Tangled Up in Text: Tefillin and the Ancient World (Brown Judaic Studies 351, 2008), 55-98monograph

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

All attested forms of μέτωπον

genitive n p

μετώπων

Rev 7:3, Rev 9:4, Rev 14:1, Rev 22:4

accusative n s

μέτωπον

Rev 13:16, Rev 17:5, Rev 20:4

genitive n s

μετώπου

Rev 14:9