A colonnade or interior piazza
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Stoa names a covered colonnade or portico, a built public space where people gathered, waited, walked, and witnessed events. John uses the word at Bethesda, where the pool's five covered colonnades frame a place of long need before Jesus heals a man.
Reader summary
Full entry for στοά (G4745) · Open the biblical lexicon
Stoa names a covered colonnade or portico, a built public space where people gathered, waited, walked, and witnessed events. John uses the word at Bethesda, where the pool's five covered colonnades frame a place of long need before Jesus heals a man.
The BSB source-word alignment has 4 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include Colonnade (3), covered colonnades (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at John 5:2. Its strongest book concentrations include Acts (2), John (2).
Stoa names a covered colonnade or portico, a built public space where people gathered, waited, walked, and witnessed events. John uses the word at Bethesda, where the pool's five covered colonnades frame a place of long need before Jesus heals a man. John also names Solomon's Colonnade as the place where Jesus walks in the temple courts during public questioning.
Acts returns to Solomon's Colonnade after the healing of the lame man and during the apostles' signs among the people. The word does not make architecture holy by itself. It helps readers see how public spaces become settings for mercy, controversy, witness, and gathered response when God acts in the open.
Stoa names a covered colonnade or portico. In John and Acts it frames public settings where need is visible, Jesus is questioned, and apostolic witness gathers attention.
Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool with five covered colonnades, which in Hebrew is called Bethesda.
Bethesda's five covered colonnades frame a public place of need before Jesus heals a man.
And Jesus was walking in the temple courts in Solomon’s Colonnade.
Jesus walks in Solomon's Colonnade during a public temple setting in John 10.
While the man clung to Peter and John, all the people were astonished and ran to them in the walkway called Solomon’s Colonnade.
The healed man clings to Peter and John as the crowd runs to Solomon's Colonnade.
The apostles performed many signs and wonders among the people, and with one accord the believers gathered together in Solomon’s Colonnade.
The believers gather in Solomon's Colonnade while apostolic signs and wonders occur among the people.
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. a colonnade or interior piazza
:--porch.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
4 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
a colonnade, portico
Read versea colonnade, portico
Read versea colonnade, portico
Read versea colonnade, portico
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 2 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.
στοά 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.
Stoa reminds teachers that Scripture often places divine action in recognizable public spaces. Bethesda's colonnades are not decorative detail; they frame a place where need has become visible and long-standing. Solomon's Colonnade becomes a setting where Jesus walks and where His identity is contested in public. In Acts, the same named space gathers astonished crowds and then the early church's public witness.
The word helps readers see the continuity between place and testimony without making architecture the source of grace. God acts in streets, courts, pools, homes, and porticoes, but the power belongs to Him. Stoa trains the teacher to read built environments as settings for witness while keeping the emphasis on the Lord's mercy and word.
John.10.23
Stoa refers to a covered portico or colonnade. English may render the term as colonnade, portico, porch, or covered walkway depending on the setting.
Temple courts, gates, and public gathering places appear throughout Scripture as settings for teaching, judgment, prayer, and mercy. Stoa belongs to that spatial pattern, but its meaning is governed by each New Testament scene.
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Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon — CC BY 4.0
Berean Standard Bible (BSB) source-word alignment - CC0 Public Domain