to go out toward someone who is coming and come face to face with them
Every use of this verb involves movement. One party is on the way, and another closes the gap: they leave where they are, head toward the traveler, and the two come face to face. English Bibles almost always render it simply "met," which is accurate but flattens the going out that the Greek word carries inside it.
The New Testament uses it in three settings:
- a welcome, when people go out to receive someone whose arrival they have heard about
- an interception, when someone comes at a traveler who has only just arrived
- a battle, when a king marches his army out against an advancing enemy
The feeling of any given verse comes from the story, not from the verb. It carries Martha hurrying out of the house to Jesus and the festival crowd streaming out of Jerusalem to greet him, and it carries just as easily the two men who come at Jesus from the tombs so violently that no one could use that road. Nine of its ten appearances are in narrative, and in the healing accounts it regularly introduces the figure who comes at a newly arrived traveler.
Koine Greek had two other verbs for meeting that mean essentially the same thing, ἀπαντάω and συναντάω, and writers moved freely among the three. Copyists swapped them too, so the choice of one over another rarely signals anything. The matching noun for the meeting itself (ὑπάντησις) belongs to the same family.