A cave is a hollow place that can become a tomb, refuge, or hiding place, with its moral significance determined by those uses. John describes Lazarus' tomb as a cave closed by a stone, making the setting concrete before Jesus calls him out.
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Full entry for σπήλαιον (G4693) · Open the biblical lexicon
A cave is a hollow place that can become a tomb, refuge, or hiding place, with its moral significance determined by those uses. John describes Lazarus' tomb as a cave closed by a stone, making the setting concrete before Jesus calls him out.
The BSB source-word alignment has 6 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include a den (3), caves (2), a cave (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 21:13. Its strongest book concentrations include Hebrews (1), John (1), Luke (1), Mark (1).
A cave is a hollow place that can become a tomb, refuge, or hiding place, with its moral significance determined by those uses. John describes Lazarus' tomb as a cave closed by a stone, making the setting concrete before Jesus calls him out. Hebrews names caves among the places where mistreated people of faith live, honoring them despite their destitution. Jesus uses a robbers' den comparison when confronting the misuse of the temple courts.
The noun is therefore neither automatically holy nor inherently criminal. A faithful person can hide in a cave while a worship place can be accused of becoming the shelter of wrongdoing. What matters is the narrated condition or conduct and the speaker's argument. Teaching can preserve both the dignity of displaced people and the force of Jesus' challenge to religiously sheltered evil.
Lazarus' cave tomb, the refuge of persecuted people, and the robbers' den accusation show three distinct contextual roles. Physical form alone does not establish either moral failure or spiritual safety.
Jesus, once again deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance.
The cave and entrance stone describe Lazarus' tomb as Jesus arrives deeply moved; Martha's following objection emphasizes that Lazarus has been dead four days.
The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and hid in caves and holes in the ground.
Caves shelter destitute and mistreated people whom the passage calls worthy of more than the world offers, followed by explicit commendation of their faith.
And He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
Jesus contrasts the house of prayer with a robbers' den after confronting the temple commerce, invoking a scriptural accusation rather than condemning the physical existence of caves.
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. Cave as refuge or hideout: literal shelter or metaphorical place of concealment and protection.
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.
a cave, den
Read versea cave, den
Read versea cave, den
Read versea cave, den
Read versea cave, den
Read versea cave, den
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 4 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 6 lexical occurrence verses.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Hebrews refuses to judge faith by comfortable accommodation. People endure mistreatment and hide in caves, yet the text commends their faith and declares the world unworthy of them. John's cave is different: it holds Lazarus behind a stone until Jesus calls him out. Jesus' temple rebuke uses the den comparison for another problem, the sheltering of wrongdoing within a place associated with worship.
These contexts separate a person's living conditions from their moral standing and a worship place's reputation from the conduct actually taking place. A teacher can therefore honor displaced believers without romanticizing destitution, proclaim Jesus' life-giving action without promising an identical immediate miracle, and hear the temple warning without extending guilt to an entire people.
The cave's physical shape supplies no shortcut around those distinctions.
Heb.11.38
The Greek noun identifies a cave or cavern and can form the den-of-robbers comparison. The surrounding phrase, inhabitants and event give it the tomb, refuge or culpable-shelter role; those roles should not be treated as identical moral definitions.
Jesus' house-of-prayer and robbers' den wording can be read beside Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 in the local BSB. Jeremiah's surrounding accusation concerns wrongdoing sheltered by confidence in the named house; the comparison should challenge conduct rather than justify contempt for Jewish neighbors.