StrongerBible

sunthlibō

συνθλίβω

GreekG4918“throng, press, ...”

Appears 2 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mrk 5:24Mrk 5:31
Compound of
sunσύνwith131G4862
thlibōθλίβωto press on10G2346
Word studyResearch-gradesoon-THLEE-bohverb

What sunthlibō means

to press in on someone from every side; of a crowd, to throng and physically crush a person.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word is built from a prefix meaning "together" or "from all sides" joined to a plainer verb (θλίβω) that means "to press" or "squeeze." The compound sharpens it: not just pressing, but pressing in from every direction at once. It is an uncommon, rather bookish word, and in the whole New Testament it appears only twice, both in a single scene.

That scene is Mark chapter 5. As Jesus makes his way to the house of a dying girl, a large crowd is packed around him and keeps crushing against him bodily. The form of the verb pictures this as ongoing and sustained: they kept thronging him, hemming him in on all sides. It is not a picture of a polite following at a distance but of a dense, jostling mob pressed skin to skin.

The word is doing quiet narrative work. The crushing crowd is the backdrop for the sick woman who reaches out to touch Jesus on purpose, hoping to go unnoticed in the crush. When Jesus asks who touched him, the disciples object that a whole crowd is pressing against him: how can he single out one touch? That is the point. Everyone was pressing against him without meaning anything by it; she alone reached for him in faith. The Gospel of Luke found the picture so physical that in his version he swapped in an even stronger verb (συμπνίγω), which means "to choke" or "nearly smother."

Mrk 5:24Mrk 5:31

Disputed

How much intensifying force the prefix syn- adds here: whether it genuinely means pressure from all sides, or is only a stylistic variant of the simpler verb whose weight comes from the context.

  • majorityThe prefix is intensive or convergent, giving the sense of a crowd pressing from every direction, a real strengthening of the simplex used earlier in Mark 3:9.; C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, CGTC (1959); William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, NICNT (1974); R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (2002)
  • minorityBy the koine period the force of such prefixed compounds had often weakened, so the compound is largely a stylistic variant of the simplex, and the physicality comes from the narrative rather than the prefix.; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8, Anchor Yale Bible (2000); Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark, Hermeneia (2007)

What scholars say about sunthlibō

The standard lexicons converge on a single physical sense. LSJ gives "press together, compress," flagging the use "of a crowd" from Mark 5:24; BDAG (3rd ed.) narrows it to "press together," applied in Mark as "press upon, crowd around," and recognizes no figurative extension for the compound; Louw-Nida places it in the domain of physical impact and force alongside the simplex; Thayer glosses "to press together, press on all sides: of a thronging multitude." Schlier's TDNT article on the theta-l-b word group develops the deep theology of thlipsis (affliction, tribulation) but treats the compound as a strengthened literal form with no independent theological weight, a judgment shared by Spicq and the EDNT. The verb is absent from Moulton-Milligan's papyrus vocabulary, marking it as a literary rather than documentary word, at home in Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Strabo, Plutarch, and Josephus; Strabo (Geography 13.4.2) uses it of a nurse crushed in a crowd so badly that the infant she carried was injured, the closest narrative parallel to Mark. In the Septuagint it survives mainly in manuscript variants (Ecclesiastes 12:6; Sirach 31:14 of jostling a neighbor at the dinner table; 1 Maccabees 15:14 of a siege). Luke's parallel replaces it with sympnigo (choke, throttle), confirming how strongly the crush was understood. The commentary tradition (Vincent, Taylor, Cranfield, Lane, France, Gundry) links it to the simplex in Mark 3:9 and reads the imperfect as sustained, durative pressing, set against the woman's single decisive touch (haptomai); more recent commentators (Marcus, Yarbro Collins, Boring) caution against over-reading the prefix in koine, though they still translate with strong physical language. On the central point, that the word pictures a crushing throng of bodies, there is no dispute.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. συνθλίβωlexicon
  • BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd ed., s.v. συνθλίβωlexicon
  • Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, §19lexicon
  • J. H. Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. συνθλίβωlexicon
  • Heinrich Schlier, "θλίβω, θλῖψις," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 3:139-148dictionary
  • C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, CGTC (1959)commentary
  • William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, NICNT (1974)commentary
  • R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (2002)commentary
  • Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8, Anchor Yale Bible (2000)commentary
  • Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark, Hermeneia (2007)commentary
  • James R. Edwards, The Gospel According to Mark, Pillar (2002)commentary

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

All attested forms of συνθλίβω

imperfect active indicative 3p

συνέθλιβον

Mrk 5:24

present active participle accusative m s

συνθλίβοντά

Mrk 5:31