StrongerBible

tremō

τρέμω

GreekG5141“tremble, be afraid”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mrk 5:33Luk 8:47Act 9:62Pe 2:10
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeTREH-mohverb

What tremō means

to tremble: to shake all over without being able to stop it, usually out of fear or awe

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The word begins as a plain physical one. In older Greek anything that shakes can be said to tremble: mountains under a god's footfall, a soldier's legs when he is caught, a voice that cracks, the ground in an earthquake. Greek doctors used it of the shivering that comes with a fever. It always pictures shaking that is still going on rather than one completed shudder, so the person it describes has not stopped quivering yet.

What the Bible added was not a new definition but a setting. The Greek translators of the Old Testament needed one set of words for a whole family of Hebrew fear verbs, and out of them they made "fear and trembling" a stock phrase for how a human being responds to God's presence and power. From there, trembling became almost a badge of real faith: the faithful few in Isaiah are described as the people who tremble at God's word. So by the first century, to say that someone came to Jesus frightened and trembling was to make a claim, not merely to describe nerves.

The New Testament uses the verb four times, and every one is about a person rather than scenery.

  • The woman healed of a twelve-year bleeding comes to Jesus shaking, once she realizes what has happened in her body.
  • In one line of manuscripts, Saul on the Damascus road answers Jesus trembling and astonished.
  • Second Peter turns the word around: false teachers do not tremble when they insult beings of glory, and that missing shudder is the charge laid against them.

That last, negative use shows what the writers took for granted. Trembling is the normal, healthy reaction of a creature who meets something far greater than itself, so its absence is a symptom. The matching noun for trembling (τρόμος) carries the same idea in Paul's phrase "fear and trembling", and a related adjective (ἔντρομος) describes Moses at the burning bush and the jailer at Philippi as men left shaking. Neighboring words divide the ground differently: one (σείω) is used of shaking something else, as an earthquake shakes the ground; another (σαλεύω) of being rocked by an outside force; and a third (φρίσσω) of the sudden shudder that raises the hair on the neck, which is what James says the demons do.

Nuances

1ato shake with fear at coming face to face with God's power
Mrk 5:33Luk 8:47Act 9:6
Mrk 5:33

Why the healed woman trembles in Mark 5:33: awe at an encounter with divine power, or fear of being exposed and of Jesus's displeasure.

  • majorityHer trembling is the reverent awe of someone who has met divine power directly, in the pattern of Exodus 15:16, Psalm 2:11 and Daniel 10:11, and it belongs with Mark's other scenes of fear at a revelation (4:41, 6:50, 16:8).; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8, Anchor Yale Bible 27 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 355-360; Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 280-286
  • minorityHer trembling is fear of public exposure, since Jesus has shown he knows about her secret touch, and on Gundry's reading fear of his displeasure at how she took her healing.; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 238-239; James R. Edwards, The Gospel According to Mark, Pillar (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993)
1bto hold in awe: to feel the shudder of reverence a creature owes to a greater power
TranslatabilityPartial
2Pe 2:10

What scholars say about tremō

The lexica agree on a somatic core with an emotional extension. LSJ divides τρέμω into physical quivering (of mountains, limbs, the voice) and, by extension, trembling with fear, shading into a weakened "be afraid"; BDAG glosses "tremble, be agitated from fear" and catalogues Mark 5:33, Luke 8:47, Acts 9:6 (Textus Receptus only) and 2 Pet 2:10. Louw and Nida file the verb in two semantic domains, 16.6 (non-linear movement) and 25.261 (fear, terror, alarm), noting that each occurrence must be sorted by context. The verb is defective, attested in the present and imperfect (a late perfect and a single late aorist ἐτρόμησα at 1 Macc 2:24 aside), so the NT has only participles and a present indicative. Etymologically it belongs with the Indo-European root *trem-, giving Latin tremo and, within Greek, τρόμος, the poetic τρομέω, ἔντρομος and τρομερός (Beekes; Frisk). In the LXX the word-group renders רָעַד, חָרַד (the Sinai verb of Exod 19:16, 18 and the remnant of Isa 66:2, 5), פַּחַד, רָגַז and גּוּר, and produces the fixed pair φόβος καὶ τρόμος (Gen 9:2; Exod 15:16; Deut 2:25; 11:25; Ps 2:11), a formula essentially absent from the documentary papyri: Moulton and Milligan can cite τρόμος only from a literary fragment (PSI II 135) and the rare aorist from P.Oxy. 416, which indicates that Paul's usage is scriptural rather than colloquial. On Mark 5:33 and Luke 8:47, Marcus and Yarbro Collins read the woman's trembling as numinous awe at an encounter with δύναμις, while France, Edwards and Gundry weight fear of exposure; Bock, Fitzmyer, Marshall, Bovon and Nolland agree that Luke's compression to a single participle leaves the force unchanged. On Acts 9:6 the τρέμων τε καὶ θαμβῶν clause is not original: Metzger records that no Greek witness has it there, that it was assembled from 22:10 and 26:14 in Vulgate codices, and that Erasmus retroverted it from Latin for his 1516 edition; Barrett, Bruce, Haenchen, Pervo and Keener concur. On 2 Pet 2:10 Bauckham's identification of the δόξαι as angelic (probably fallen) beings, documented from Sir 17:13, 1QH 10:8, 1QM 12:7 and 2 Enoch 22, is followed by Neyrey, Davids and Gene Green, with a minority (Michael Green; Bigg) reading human dignitaries; the commentators are unanimous, however, that οὐ τρέμουσιν denotes reverent dread rather than physical shaking, set alongside τολμηταί and αὐθάδεις as a mark of arrogance. There is no dedicated TDNT article on τρέμω, the word-group being treated by Balz under φόβος; Spicq and NIDNTTE reach the same conclusion, that in biblical usage the group expresses reverent seriousness before God and God-appointed order rather than craven fear.

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

  • BDAG, s.v. τρέμωlexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. τρέμωlexicon
  • Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1989), domains 16.6 and 25.261lexicon
  • Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), s.v. τρέμωlexicon
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Louvain: Peeters, 2009), s.v. τρέμω, τρόμοςlexicon
  • James Hope Moulton and George Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), s.v. τρέμω, τρόμοςlexicon
  • Horst Balz, "φοβέω κτλ.," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 9 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 189-219theological-dictionary
  • Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, trans. James D. Ernest (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), s.v. φόβος, τρόμοςtheological-dictionary
  • Moisés Silva, ed., New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), s.v. τρέμω, τρόμοςtheological-dictionary
  • Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8, Anchor Yale Bible 27 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 355-360commentary
  • Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 280-286commentary
  • R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 238-239commentary
  • I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 345-347commentary
  • Darrell L. Bock, Luke 1:1-9:50, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1994), 800-802commentary
  • Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1994), 318monograph
  • C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles, vol. 1, ICC (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1994), 448-451commentary
  • Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, WBC 50 (Waco: Word, 1983), 261-263commentary
  • Jerome H. Neyrey, 2 Peter, Jude, Anchor Bible 37C (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 209-212commentary
  • Peter T. O'Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 273-284commentary

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

All attested forms of τρέμω

present active participle nominative f s

τρέμουσα

Mrk 5:33, Luk 8:47

present active indicative 3p

τρέμουσιν

2Pe 2:10

present active participle nominative m s

τρέμων

Act 9:6