Seed: offspring
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G4690 names seed that is sown and, by extension, offspring or descendants. Its forty-three governed forms move among agricultural seed, human descendants, family continuity, Abrahamic promise, Davidic descent, new birth, and apocalyptic offspring.
Reader summary
Full entry for σπέρμα (G4690) · Open the biblical lexicon
G4690 names seed that is sown and, by extension, offspring or descendants. Its forty-three governed forms move among agricultural seed, human descendants, family continuity, Abrahamic promise, Davidic descent, new birth, and apocalyptic offspring.
The BSB source-word alignment has 43 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include offspring (10), seed (10), descendants (9), children (4), seeds (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 13:24. Its strongest book concentrations include Romans (9), Matthew (7), Galatians (5), Mark (5).
G4690 names seed that is sown and, by extension, offspring or descendants. Its forty-three governed forms move among agricultural seed, human descendants, family continuity, Abrahamic promise, Davidic descent, new birth, and apocalyptic offspring. Context must decide whether the noun is literal, collective, genealogical, covenantal, christological, or figurative. No single use should be made to carry the entire range.
Agricultural passages speak of seed placed in a field, the small mustard seed, and the distinct bodies God gives to kinds of seed. The marriage questions in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20 use offspring language within an ancient levirate-law dispute. These texts do not authorize coerced marriage, sexual access, reproductive pressure, or the treatment of widows and children as property. Hebrews 11:11 must not make fertility, pregnancy, childlessness, miscarriage, or medical treatment a test of faith.
Promise and descent dominate Acts, Romans, Galatians, Hebrews, and several Gospel settings. Within Galatians 3, Paul identifies the promised referent with the Messiah in verse 16. At the chapter's close, covenantal heirship embraces everyone united to him in verse 29. Because σπέρμα can function as a collective singular, Paul's contrast must be read as his inspired argument in context, not reduced to an English number lesson or used to deny the continuing dignity of Jewish people. Romans 9 distinguishes physical descent from promise, and Romans 11 immediately refuses the claim that God rejected his people.
John 8 addresses particular speakers whose conduct contradicts their claim to Abrahamic identity. It cannot support collective Jewish guilt, racial theology, antisemitism, or violence. First John 3:9 uses God's abiding seed within new-birth teaching and does not teach effortless sinlessness or justify shaming a struggling believer. Revelation 12:17 portrays the dragon's war against the woman's remaining offspring, but the image cannot by itself settle every question about Israel, Mary, the church, or end-time chronology.
Forty-three governed forms in forty verses use seed language for agriculture, family descent, covenant promise, Davidic lineage, life from God, and apocalyptic conflict.
And to your seed, meaning One, who is Christ
Paul identifies Christ as the focal promised seed.
Did God reject His people? Certainly not!
Paul's denial governs any account of Abrahamic descent and promise.
To each kind of seed He gives its own body
Agricultural seed supports Paul's resurrection analogy while retaining its own literal register.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Greek word. Offspring or descendants, often used metaphorically for spiritual progeny or promised heirs in covenant theology.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 44 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
seed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseseed, offspring
Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
This word appears as a noun across 6 case and number patterns. The form changes show how the word functions in a sentence; they do not change the basic lexical meaning by themselves.
Verse guides are not available for this word yet, so verse references remain plain evidence markers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 2 selected witnesses from 43 lexical occurrence verses.
σπέρμα is built from this root:
Represents God’s regenerating work that produces a new moral orientation. 1 John 3:4-10
God’s abiding life within believers grounds their transformed behavior.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
G4690 shows how one ordinary noun can serve several carefully distinguished biblical arguments. Seed can be planted, compared, embodied, or used for descendants. It can name Davidic or Abrahamic lineage, the promised Christ, those belonging to Christ, God's life-giving work in the believer, or the woman's persecuted offspring in Revelation. Responsible teaching neither fragments these uses nor fuses them.
It lets Galatians name Christ as the promised seed, lets Romans deny God's rejection of Israel, lets First John speak of new birth without denying the believer's need for confession, and lets agricultural and family passages retain their own aims. This approach protects the gospel from racial pride, supersessionist contempt, fertility pressure, eugenic fantasies, and end-time demonization.
Gal.3.16
The governed forms include singular and plural case forms, with three occurrences in Galatians 3:16 itself. The noun often functions collectively, so grammatical singularity does not automatically mean one biological individual. Paul's explicit seed and seeds contrast is a theological reading within his Abrahamic promise argument.
Hebrew H2233 carries much of the Old Testament seed and offspring range behind these New Testament arguments. Connections should follow explicit quotations and book-level reasoning rather than making every H2233 occurrence a direct prophecy of a single New Testament referent.
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Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon — CC BY 4.0
Berean Standard Bible (BSB) source-word alignment - CC0 Public Domain