To harden describes becoming or making stubborn in the selected Greek passages, but the agent and response must remain those named by the text. Acts reports people stubbornly refusing belief and publicly maligning the Way, after which Paul changes the place of teaching.
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Full entry for σκληρύνω (G4645) · Open the biblical lexicon
To harden describes becoming or making stubborn in the selected Greek passages, but the agent and response must remain those named by the text. Acts reports people stubbornly refusing belief and publicly maligning the Way, after which Paul changes the place of teaching.
The BSB source-word alignment has 6 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include harden (3), He hardens (1), may be hardened (1), stubbornly (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Acts 19:9. Its strongest book concentrations include Hebrews (4), Acts (1), Romans (1).
To harden describes becoming or making stubborn in the selected Greek passages, but the agent and response must remain those named by the text. Acts reports people stubbornly refusing belief and publicly maligning the Way, after which Paul changes the place of teaching. Hebrews repeatedly summons hearers not to harden their hearts and calls for daily mutual exhortation against sin's deceitfulness.
Romans speaks of God's mercy and hardening within Paul's argument concerning Moses and Pharaoh. These statements must not be rewritten to remove a stated agent or reduced to a single account of every person's spiritual future. Hear the warning, narrative action and apostolic argument in their own settings. Disagreement with a human authority is not automatically the refusal described in Acts, and the verb does not give a teacher knowledge that a particular living person's final condition is settled.
Stubborn refusal in Acts, repeated hearer-directed warning in Hebrews and God's stated hardening in Romans have different agents and argumentative roles. The word preserves those statements without independently settling a complete doctrine of human response or divine judgment.
But when some of them stubbornly refused to believe and publicly maligned the Way, Paul took his disciples and left the synagogue to conduct daily discussions in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.
Some publicly malign the Way after stubborn refusal, and Paul withdraws with the disciples to teach daily elsewhere; the account reports his changed teaching location rather than coercive retaliation.
Do not harden your hearts, as you did in the rebellion, in the day of testing in the wilderness,
The quoted warning not to harden hearts names the wilderness rebellion and testing, and its repeated today summons addresses the present hearers rather than declaring every resistant person beyond response.
Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and He hardens whom He wants to harden.
Paul explicitly ascribes mercy and hardening to God following the Moses and Pharaoh citations; the ensuing objection and potter comparison belong to his argument and must not be replaced by a lexical slogan.
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. Hardening the heart against God's word through willful resistance, not mere intellectual disagreement
Hardening the heart against God's word through willful resistance, not mere intellectual disagreement
(σκληρός), [in LXX chiefly for קָשָׁה hi., also for חָזַק ;] to harden. Metaphorical, to harden, make stubborn: with accusative of person(s), Rom.9:18; T. καρδίας (Psa.95:8), Heb.3:8, 15 4:7. Pass., to become hardened: Act.19:9, Heb.3:13.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpusGreek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
6 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
I harden
Read verseI harden
Read verseI harden
Read verseI harden
Read verseI harden
Read verseI harden
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 mood, tense, and voice shift the force of this verb in context.
This verb appears through different tense, voice, mood, or stem patterns. Those forms help readers see how the action is presented in context.
Verse guides are not available for this word yet, so verse references remain plain evidence markers.
How this verb appears across 5 occurrences in the NT discourse index (MACULA Greek SBLGNT).
Aspect reflects grammatical form — not authorial emphasis. Participles and infinitives are verbal adjectives and nouns respectively.
Clause data: MACULA Greek (Clear Bible, CC BY 4.0) · SBLGNT (Logos/SBL, CC BY 4.0)
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 3 selected witnesses from 6 lexical occurrence verses.
σκληρύνω is built from this root:
Describes God’s judicial action in confirming persistent rebellion.Acts 19:8-10
Describes moral resistance to God's voice.Hebrews 3:7-19
Describes the spiritual condition of rejecting hearers.Romans 9:14-29
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Hebrews addresses hearers with a repeated today: if they hear God's voice, they must not harden their hearts. The argument also calls for daily mutual exhortation so that sin's deceitfulness does not harden anyone, making attentive shared response part of the passage's stated movement. Acts supplies a particular case of stubborn refusal and public opposition, answered by Paul's relocation of daily teaching rather than a narrated effort to force belief.
Romans supplies another statement, explicitly attributing mercy and hardening to God within Paul's Moses-and-Pharaoh argument. A faithful study must retain all these agents and movements without choosing one occurrence to silence the others. The verb is not itself a complete solution to every doctrinal question. Nor may it become a teacher's private verdict about a person's final future, a diagnosis of grief or an accusation against someone reporting a leader's wrongdoing.
Heb.3.8
The licensed Greek hardening verb is metaphorical in the selected New Testament uses and includes making stubborn or becoming hardened. The sentence supplies God, hearers or sin's deceitfulness in different stated relations. Grammatical descriptions may clarify the sentence but cannot be promoted into an independent canonical theory of agency or a new sense.
Psalm 95:7-11 joins worship and belonging to the warning not to harden hearts at Meribah and Massah, the history explicitly quoted in Hebrews. Exodus' Pharaoh account supplies another named setting. These Hebrew witnesses must retain their own agents and history rather than becoming a general diagnosis of every contemporary refusal or a lexical proof that resolves the entire election discussion.