Pity
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οἰκτιρμός names the deep inward feeling of pity and compassion — the visceral response of one person to another's suffering or need. It is derived from oikteiro (to pity, to feel compassion) and appears in selected NT contexts where the compassion of God is either being described or being called for in the community.
Reader summary
Full entry for οἰκτιρμός (G3628) · Open the biblical lexicon
οἰκτιρμός names the deep inward feeling of pity and compassion — the visceral response of one person to another's suffering or need. It is derived from oikteiro (to pity, to feel compassion) and appears in selected NT contexts where the compassion of God is either being described or being called for in the community.
The BSB source-word alignment has 5 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include mercy (2), of compassion (2), compassion (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Romans 12:1. Its strongest book concentrations include 2 Corinthians (1), Colossians (1), Hebrews (1), Philippians (1).
οἰκτιρμός names the deep inward feeling of pity and compassion — the visceral response of one person to another's suffering or need. It is derived from oikteiro (to pity, to feel compassion) and appears in selected NT contexts where the compassion of God is either being described or being called for in the community. The local NT index currently counts about five selected occurrences, but its concentration in key theological and ethical passages gives it a weight that exceeds its frequency.
Second Corinthians 1:3 provides a central theological claim: 'Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies (oiktirmon) and God of all comfort (paraklesos).' God is named 'the Father of mercies' — oiktirmos is a quality He possesses as Father. The genitive 'Father of' is not merely possessive but generative: God is the source and father of all compassion. Genuine creaturely compassion reflects the God who is the source and Father of mercies.
Romans 12:1 uses oiktirmos as the motivational ground for Paul's appeal: 'I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies (oiktirmon) of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.' The entire ethical instruction of Romans 12-15 is grounded not in law or duty but in the mercies of God — what God has shown and done (developed in Romans 1-11) is the ground for the appeal. The oiktirmoi of God are the accumulated mercy of the gospel — justification, adoption, the Spirit, hope — and these are what Paul appeals to.
Colossians 3:12 calls the community to 'put on' oiktirmos as one of the virtues of the new humanity: 'Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts (splanchna oiktirmou), kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.' The 'compassionate hearts' is literally 'bowels of compassion' — the splanchna (inward parts) of oiktirmos. The image is of the deep visceral feeling of compassion, not a polite surface-level concern.
For the preacher, οἰκτιρμός is the word that grounds all community compassion in the compassion of God — because He is the Father of mercies, His children practice mercy.
The local NT index currently counts about five selected occurrences of οἰκτιρμός: Romans 12:1, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Philippians 2:1, Colossians 3:12, and Hebrews 10:28. In these selected witnesses, the word appears in the plural (oiktirmoi), suggesting the abundance of divine or communal compassion rather than a single isolated act. The Colossians passage calls the community to wear this compassion; the Romans and 2 Corinthians passages ground it in God's own character.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,
The doxology that names God as 'the Father of mercies' — ho pater ton oiktirmon. The plural mercies names the fullness of divine compassion in all its expressions. God is not merely a God who has compassion; He is the Father of it — its origin and source. This frames genuine compassion as a reality rooted in God's own character. Paul writes this in a context of suffering (2 Cor 1:4-7) — the God of all comfort meets the suffering person through the very compassion that defines His character as Father.
Therefore I urge you, brothers, on account of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
The mercies (oiktirmoi) of God as the ground of the ethical appeal. Paul's entire ethical instruction in Romans 12-15 is motivated by what God has done — the gospel of justification, adoption, the Spirit, and hope that Romans 1-11 has unfolded. The ethical life is the response to the mercies, not the path to them. The 'therefore' (oun) connects everything that follows to everything that has preceded: because of this — all of this — present your bodies to God.
Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.
The community is called to clothe itself in splanchna oiktirmou — 'bowels of compassion' — as the first virtue of the new humanity in Christ. The visceral language ('bowels') names a compassion that comes from the deepest place in the person, not from the surface of polite concern. The five virtues that follow (kindness, lowliness, humility, patience) all require this compassion as their foundation: you cannot be genuinely kind, humble, or patient with people you do not genuinely feel compassion toward.
Therefore if you have any encouragement in Christ, if any comfort from His love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any affection and compassion,
Paul's appeal to the experienced reality of oiktirmos in the Philippian community: 'if there is any tenderness and compassion' (splanchna kai oiktirmoi). The 'if' is not expressing doubt but making a logical appeal — Paul is certain these are present, and he is appealing to them as the basis for the unity he is requesting in verse 2. The compassion the community has experienced is the ground for the compassion they are called to show one another.
Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
The negative use: the death penalty under the Mosaic law was carried out 'without oiktirmos' — without pity or compassion. This establishes the legal baseline against which Hebrews then argues the greater severity of rejecting the Son of God (v. 29) and the greater compassion of the one who is merciful and faithful (Heb 2:17 — Christ as the merciful High Priest). The absence of oiktirmos in the old covenant's severest judgment throws into relief the presence of oiktirmos in Christ.
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. Deep feeling of compassion arising from the bowels; God's merciful nature toward human suffering and need.
Deep feeling of compassion arising from the bowels; God's merciful nature toward human suffering and need.
(οἰκτείρω), [in LXX, usually in pl., chiefly for רַחַם ;] compassion, pity. σπλάγχνα οἰκτιρμοῦ, a heart of compassion, Col.3:12; in pl. (as LXX for Heb. רַחַם), οἰ. τ. θεοῦ, Rom.12:1, Heb.10:28; ό πατὴρ τῶν οἰ, 2Co.1:3; σπλάγχνα κ. οἰ., Php.2:1.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
5 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
pity, compassion
Read versepity, compassion
Read versepity, compassion
Read versepity, compassion
Read versepity, compassion
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 3 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 1 selected witness from 5 lexical occurrence verses.
οἰκτιρμός is built from this root:
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
οἰκτιρμός is the NT's word for the deep, visceral compassion that belongs first to God as His own character and then to the community as a reflection of their Father. Second Corinthians 1:3 names God as 'the Father of mercies' — not a God who happens to show compassion in favorable circumstances, but a God whose fatherhood is defined by it, who generates it, who is its origin and source.
The gospel is the clearest expression of this: the oiktirmoi of God in Romans 12:1 are not abstract attributes but the concrete actions of Romans 1-11 — justification, adoption, the Spirit, hope, the love of God poured out. These are the mercies Paul appeals to when he calls the community to present themselves as living sacrifices. The preacher who teaches oiktirmos will help the congregation understand that genuine compassion in the church is not merely a community virtue but a reflection of the Father's own character — and that the invitation of Romans 12:1 is to let the received mercy of God become the outgoing mercy of the community's life.
The community that has been shown the mercies of God is called to wear them (Col 3:12): to put on compassionate hearts as the first garment of the new humanity.
Rom.12.1
οἰκτιρμός derives from the verb oikteiro (to pity, to feel compassion for), which in turn may be related to oiktos (pity). The word is connected to the sight and experience of suffering that moves one to response — oiktirmos is the compassion that sees someone's condition and is moved by it. In the LXX, it translates Hebrew words for compassion and mercy, especially rachamim (the deep compassion of tender mercies, often connected to the womb — rechem).
The NT's regular plural use in these selected witnesses reflects the Hebrew Psalter's rachamim (plural of abundance), suggesting that the writers are drawing on the OT's language of divine compassion in its abundance. The compound splanchna kai oiktirmoi (Php 2:1; Col 3:12) pairs the inward organs (splanchna — the seat of emotion) with oiktirmos to create the most visceral possible picture of compassion: felt from the deepest inward place, not performed on the surface.
The OT background for oiktirmos is primarily the rachamim tradition — the deep, womb-like compassion of God that appears throughout the Psalms and prophets. Psalm 103:13 — 'As a father shows compassion (racham) to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him' — is the OT text that 2 Corinthians 1:3's 'Father of mercies' most directly echoes.
Lamentations 3:22-23 — 'The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies (rachamim) never come to an end; they are new every morning' — gives the Babylonian-exile community its ground of hope precisely in the oiktirmos of God when everything else has been lost. Isaiah 54:7-8 — 'with deep compassion (rachamim rabbim) I will bring you back' — is the restoration oracle grounded in God's own compassion as its driving motivation.
The NT's oiktirmos inherits all of this and locates its fullest expression in Christ: the 'merciful and faithful High Priest' (Heb 2:17) who was moved by compassion throughout His earthly ministry and who, on the cross, enacted a climactic expression of the Father's mercies.
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