Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
kairos
Time. The right moment, as against time on a clock.
Mark 1:15, in every translation this tool compares.
Timing is everything. What time is it? English uses one word for both and you never confuse them, because the sentence around it does the work.
Because Greek has two words for time and English has one, so a statement that the moment has arrived reads as a statement about the calendar.
Every version reads time, season, or occasion.
καιρός kairos · G2540
Kairos is an opportune or decisive moment. Chronos is duration, clock and calendar time. Mark 1:15 is about a moment having arrived, not about a date.
English has one noun and supplies the distinction with adjectives, so a word that means the decisive moment reads as a neutral word for time.
Where a language has two words and yours has one, the choice between them is information you will never see in translation.
Time is the majority rendering; season and appointed time appear where the decisive sense is unmistakable.
- kairos at Mark 1:15; Romans 5:6; Galatians 6:9
- chronos at Acts 1:7 alongside kairos
- Both nouns together at 1 Thessalonians 5:1
