StrongerBible

pou

ποῦ

GreekG4226where, whither

Appears 48 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 2:2Mat 2:4Mat 8:20Mat 26:17Mrk 14:12Mrk 14:14Mrk 15:47Luk 8:25Luk 9:58Luk 12:17Luk 17:17Luk 17:37Rom 3:27Gal 4:15
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What pou means

where: the question word asking at what place someone or something is, or where it is going

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This is the ordinary Greek word for asking "where." It wants to know the place of something: where a person is, where an object has been put, where a road leads. In the Gospels it opens some of the most direct questions in the story, from the wise men asking where the newborn king is, to the sisters asking Jesus where he wants the Passover prepared, to Jesus asking where they have laid Lazarus.

Older Greek kept two separate question words, one for "where is it?" and another for "where is it going?" By the time of the New Testament the second had faded, and this one word does both jobs. So the same word asks "Where is he?" and "Where are you going?" The older King James Bible still marks the difference with the now archaic "whither" for the second kind, as when the disciples ask, "Lord, whither goest thou?"

Very often the question is not really looking for an answer. A speaker asks "where?" to make a point that something is gone or was never there. When Jesus asks the frightened disciples, "Where is your faith?" he is not requesting its location but exposing its absence. Paul's "Where then is boasting?" means there is no room left for it, and his taunt "O death, where is your victory?" declares that death has been stripped of it. This is a matter of force, not a change of meaning: the word still means "where," but the question has been turned into a statement.

Mat 2:2Mat 2:4Mat 8:20Mat 26:17Mrk 14:12Mrk 14:14Mrk 15:47Luk 8:25Luk 9:58Luk 12:17Luk 17:17Luk 17:37

What scholars say about pou

ποῦ is the interrogative adverb of place, standard from Homer onward (LSJ, s.v. ποῦ). BDAG classifies its New Testament uses in two groups: literal questions of location, both direct (Matthew 2:2) and indirect (John 20:2, 13), and rhetorical questions in which the expected answer is "nowhere" or "no longer," asserting absence or abolition (Romans 3:27; 1 Corinthians 1:20; 1 Corinthians 15:55; 2 Peter 3:4). A well-known feature of Koine is the collapse of the classical distinction between ποῦ ("where, at what place") and ποῖ ("whither, to what place"): ποῖ has effectively dropped out, and ποῦ absorbs its directional function, standing with verbs of motion (John 3:8; 7:35; 13:36; 16:5; Hebrews 11:8; 1 John 2:11). This is documented in the standard grammars (Blass, Debrunner, and Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament §103; Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek). The interrogative ποῦ, written with the circumflex, must be distinguished from the enclitic indefinite πού ("somewhere, in some measure"), a separate lexeme. There is no scholarly dispute about the word's meaning.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. ποῦlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. ποῦlexicon
  • Blass, Debrunner, and Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, §103reference
  • James Hope Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek, vol. 1 (Prolegomena)reference

All attested forms of ποῦ

adv

ποῦ, Ποῦ

Mat 2:2, Mat 2:4, Mat 8:20, Mat 26:17, Mrk 14:12, Mrk 14:14, Mrk 15:47, Luk 8:25