StrongerBible

pentheō

πενθέω

GreekG3996“mourn, grieve”

Appears 10 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 5:4Mat 9:15Mrk 16:10Luk 6:251Co 5:22Co 12:21Jas 4:9Rev 18:11Rev 18:15Rev 18:19
Root family
Word studypen-THEH-ohverb

What pentheō means

to mourn: to grieve a loss so deeply that the sorrow shows

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is grief that has gone public. It is the word for what the bereaved do, and in the New Testament it hardly ever stands alone: over and over it is joined to weeping (κλαίω), so that mourning names the whole condition of a grieving person while weeping names the sound that condition makes. Dust on the head, torn clothes, a household that stops its ordinary business: this is the sorrow of someone who has lost something real, and everyone around can see it.

From the funeral the word travels outward, and each of its uses keeps that same weight of real loss:

  • the grief of the bereaved, and the settled mourning a death lays on a household
  • the wail raised over a ruined city by the merchants who watch their fortune burn
  • the sorrow a church owes over sin it has quietly tolerated
  • the mourning Jesus blesses, and the mourning he warns is coming for the comfortable

What holds these together is that something has genuinely been lost, and mourning is the honest answer to it. That is why the word keeps turning up as the exact opposite of laughter, feasting, and a wedding: you cannot celebrate and mourn at the same time, so the presence of one announces the absence of the other. It is also why the apostles can demand it. If a community has lost its integrity, the fitting response is not embarrassment but grief.

The word is worth distinguishing from the inward ache of a hurt heart (λυπέω). That pain can stay hidden, and one person can inflict it on another. Mourning here is the sorrow you can see, the state a person is publicly in, and the New Testament attaches a promise to it: those who mourn now are exactly the ones who will be comforted.

Nuances

1ato mourn a death: the grief of the bereaved and the state of mourning a death imposes
TranslatabilityDirect
Mat 9:15Mrk 16:10
1bto wail over a ruin: the lament raised as a city and the wealth it carried are destroyed
Rev 18:11Rev 18:15Rev 18:19
1cto grieve over wrongdoing: heartbroken sorrow over sin in oneself or in one's community
1Co 5:22Co 12:21Jas 4:9
1dmourning on the hinge of God's reversal: the sorrow he promises to comfort, and the sorrow coming to those who are laughing now
Mat 5:4Luk 6:25

What scholars say about pentheō

Standard lexica treat this verb as a single word of grief with no serious semantic dispute. BDAG glosses it as experiencing sadness in consequence of some condition or circumstance (be sad, grieve, mourn), distinguishing the ordinary intransitive use from the transitive construction at 2 Corinthians 12:21, where Paul mourns over unrepentant members of the congregation. LSJ documents the classical range from bewailing the dead to being in formal mourning. Bultmann's TDNT treatment traces the Septuagint background, where the verb regularly renders אבל and belongs to the funeral-lament vocabulary alongside κλαίω and θρηνέω, and notes the eschatological reversal formula in which mourning is answered by comfort. The Matthean beatitude draws on Isaiah 61:2-3 in its Greek form, where those who mourn are precisely the ones God promises to comfort; commentators debate the referent of that mourning (affliction and the state of the present age versus penitential sorrow over sin) without disputing the lexical sense of the verb. In Revelation 18 the verb belongs to a dirge over Babylon modeled on the Ezekiel oracles against Tyre, where the mourners are the merchants and shipmasters ruined by the city's fall rather than kin of the dead, an extension of funeral language to commercial catastrophe.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. πενθέωlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. πενθέωlexicon
  • Rudolf Bultmann, "πενθέω, πένθος," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testamenttheological-dictionary
  • Moisés Silva, ed., New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, s.v. πενθέωtheological-dictionary
  • W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, ICCcommentary
  • Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTCcommentary
  • David E. Aune, Revelation 17-22, WBCcommentary
  • Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecymonograph

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

All attested forms of πενθέω

present active participle nominative m p

πενθοῦντες

Mat 5:4, Rev 18:15, Rev 18:19

aorist active imperative 2p

πενθήσατε

Jas 4:9

aorist active indicative 2p

ἐπενθήσατε

1Co 5:2

aorist active subjunctive 1s

πενθήσω

2Co 12:21

future active indicative 2p

πενθήσετε

Luk 6:25

present active indicative 3p

πενθοῦσιν

Rev 18:11

present active infinitive

πενθεῖν

Mat 9:15

present active participle dative m p

πενθοῦσιν

Mrk 16:10