to know beforehand: to be aware of someone or something in advance
At its core this verb simply joins "before" to the ordinary word for knowing, so it means to know, perceive, or recognize something ahead of time. Outside the Bible that is nearly always what it meant: the advance knowledge a doctor has when predicting how an illness will go, or a long acquaintance with a person you have known for years. The English word "prognosis" comes straight from its noun.
When people are the ones doing the knowing, the New Testament uses it in exactly this plain way. Paul tells King Agrippa that the Jews have known him for a long time, and Peter tells his readers that they now know something in advance and so can be on guard. No one disputes these cases.
The hard cases are the ones where God is the one who knows beforehand. There the word seems to carry more weight than cool advance information, and many scholars read it as a relational, choosing kind of knowing rather than mere prior awareness. That fuller sense is treated separately below, because whether it is truly a different shade of meaning or just the same plain word in a heavier setting is itself debated.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether this verb, when God is its subject, means a relational and elective knowing (to set covenant love on, to choose beforehand) or only plain advance knowledge (prescience).
- majorityIt carries a relational, elective force drawn from the Hebrew sense of "knowing" as singling out and committing to a people; God foreknows persons, not merely facts about them. This is now the dominant reading across Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran, and New Perspective commentators.; C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans (ICC), vol. 1, p. 431; John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT, 1959/68), pp. 316-18; Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans (BECNT, 2nd ed. 2018), pp. 449-53; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A, 1988), p. 482
- minorityIt means ordinary prior cognition; the relational sense is read back into the word from later theology, since no extra-biblical Greek and no Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible uses this compound for electing, and a compound word does not simply inherit a Hebrew word's range.; Thomas R. Edgar, 'The Meaning of ΠΡΟΓΙΝΩΣΚΩ', Chafer Theological Seminary Journal 9.1 (2003): 43-80; Paul A. Himes, Foreknowledge and Social Identity in 1 Peter (Wipf & Stock, 2014); D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies (2nd ed., 1996), pp. 28-32, 61-62