sebomai

σέβομαι is a middle deponent verb on the σεβ- root (with σέβας, σεβάζομαι, σέβασμα, εὐσέβεια, θεοσεβής), used in classical Greek for the awe felt before what is holy and, by extension, for the cult paid to a deity; LSJ and BDAG agree on this core sense of reverencing or worshipping, and Foerster in TDNT traces the movement from religious scruple to the settled vocabulary of worship. In the Septuagint the verb is uncommon, rendering יָרֵא at Joshua 4:24 and standing in the Isaiah 29:13 text quoted at Matthew 15:9 and Mark 7:7, while φοβέομαι and λατρεύω carry the bulk of the Hebrew worship vocabulary. The New Testament distribution is striking: apart from that Isaianic citation and the two narrative uses at Acts 18:13 (the charge before Gallio) and Acts 19:27 (the cult of Artemis at Ephesus), every occurrence is the substantival participle οἱ σεβόμενοι applied to Gentile adherents of the synagogue, sometimes absolutely (Acts 17:17) and sometimes with τὸν θεόν (Acts 16:14; 18:7). Whether that participle, and the parallel οἱ φοβούμενοι τὸν θεόν, designates a defined social class has been argued since Lake questioned its technical status; Kraabel treated the God-fearers as largely a Lukan literary construct, while Feldman, Trebilco, Levinskaya, and above all the Aphrodisias inscription published by Reynolds and Tannenbaum are widely taken to establish a real and widespread body of Gentile sympathizers. Barrett notes the exegetical difficulty at Acts 13:43, where σεβομένων qualifies προσηλύτων, a group that had already converted.