peirazō

This is the heart of the word. To test something is to subject it to a trial that reveals its true character: is this faith genuine, will this loyalty hold, is this claim true? The word itself does not say whether the test is kind or cruel. That depends entirely on who is doing the testing and why. The very same word describes God proving Abraham, the devil assaulting Jesus, and hostile crowds trying to trip up a teacher with trick questions.

That single range is what makes the word so charged in the New Testament. Because the act of testing is morally neutral, the same word can hold opposite intentions. When God or a faithful person does the testing, the goal is to prove worth, refine character, or sort the true from the false, and a passed test becomes a crown. When the devil, or a person acting in bad faith, does the testing, the same probing becomes a trap meant to expose a weakness and bring about a fall.

A distinct and dangerous reversal is when people test God: daring him to prove himself, demanding that he act on their terms, treating him as the one on trial. The Bible treats this as a faithless act, the opposite of trust, and the original audience would have heard echoes of Israel's rebellion in the wilderness at the place they named Massah, where they tested the Lord by asking whether he was really among them.

The senses below sort these by who is testing and to what end. The English habit of splitting the word into a neutral "test" and a sinister "tempt" can obscure that they are one word in the original, and that the line between proving and enticing is drawn by the tester's heart, not by the verb.

Alongside its main sense of testing, this word carries an everyday sense with no notion of a trial at all: simply to try, to attempt, to make an effort to do something. This use is common in ordinary Greek letters and records of the era, where it regularly means to try to do a thing.

In the New Testament this plain sense shows up a handful of times in Acts, always describing an effort to carry out an action: Saul trying to join the disciples, Paul and his companions trying to enter a region, an attempt to desecrate the temple. Here the word is best rendered "tried to," and nothing of proving or tempting is in view.