Water (as if rainy) literally or figuratively
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Hydōr is the Greek word for water — ordinary physical water, the substance without which human life cannot continue — but in the New Testament it carries an extraordinary range of theological meaning. John's Gospel uses it more than any other New Testament book and gives it its most concentrated symbolic weight.
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Full entry for ὕδωρ (G5204) · Open the biblical lexicon
Hydōr is the Greek word for water — ordinary physical water, the substance without which human life cannot continue — but in the New Testament it carries an extraordinary range of theological meaning. John's Gospel uses it more than any other New Testament book and gives it its most concentrated symbolic weight.
The BSB source-word alignment has 76 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include water (47), waters (11), with water (6), of water (4), [the] water (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 3:11. Its strongest book concentrations include John (21), Revelation (18), Acts (7), Matthew (7).
This entry includes 5 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
Hydōr is the Greek word for water — ordinary physical water, the substance without which human life cannot continue — but in the New Testament it carries an extraordinary range of theological meaning. John's Gospel uses it more than any other New Testament book and gives it its most concentrated symbolic weight. Jesus speaks to a Samaritan woman at a well and offers her water that becomes an internal spring welling up to eternal life.
He speaks of being born of water and Spirit (John 3:5). At the Feast of Tabernacles he cries out that whoever believes in him will have rivers of living water flowing from within them. On the cross, water flows from his pierced side alongside blood. The Book of Revelation pictures the river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God. At every point hydōr moves between the literal and the figurative without leaving either behind.
Water is the physical substance everyone in the ancient world understood as essential and scarce; Jesus uses that shared human knowledge to describe what he gives — the Spirit, eternal life, cleansing, regeneration — as something that meets the deepest thirst of human existence. The word carries the entire Old Testament river of God's provision (the water from the rock, the streams in the desert Isaiah promises, the river from the temple in Ezekiel) into the New Testament's account of what Jesus and the Spirit supply.
Hydōr appears in the local Greek index about 76 times in the New Testament, with John's Gospel and Revelation serving as major theological centers for the word. It also appears in the Synoptics in connection with John's baptism, Jesus' baptism, and various physical contexts (rivers, wells, floods, storms). The word's range spans literal water, baptismal water, and symbolic living water.
But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a fount of water springing up to eternal life.”
The Samaritan woman conversation is the most concentrated water theology in the Gospels. Jesus contrasts the physical hydōr of Jacob's well (which you drink from and thirst again) with the water he gives (which becomes a spring within you, welling up to eternal life). The image is of internal, perpetual, life-giving supply — the opposite of a cistern requiring constant replenishment.
Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said: ‘Streams of living water will flow from within him.’”
At the Feast of Tabernacles (when water-pouring ceremonies celebrated God's rain provision), Jesus speaks of hydōr flowing from within the believer. John notes this refers to the Spirit (v.39). The image draws on Ezekiel 47's river from the temple and Isaiah's desert-streams promises. The believer becomes a conduit, not merely a recipient, of living water.
Instead, one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water flowed out.
The blood and water from the pierced side of Jesus has generated extensive theological reflection. In John's symbolic economy, water and blood together speak to baptism and the Lord's Supper, or to the Spirit and redemption. The physical detail carries covenantal and pneumatological weight for John's community.
Then the angel showed me a river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb
The final vision of the New Testament's hydōr is a river of life-water flowing from the throne. This fulfills Ezekiel 47's river from the temple, which brought life wherever it flowed. The eschatological city has the water of life at its center — creaturely need met by divine provision in the fullness of restoration.
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.
The water-and-Spirit combination in John 3 is debated (Does it refer to physical birth? Baptism? The cleansing of Ezekiel 36?), but the association of hydōr with regeneration and entry into God's kingdom is clear. The word here is not purely physical — it has been drawn into the theology of new birth through the Spirit.
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.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Greek word. Water represents spiritual cleansing, divine truth, and life-giving grace in NT theological usage.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 79 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
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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 8 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.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 1 selected witness from 76 lexical occurrence verses.
ὕδωρ is built from this root:
Affirms the historical and embodied nature of Christ’s mission. 1 John 5:6-12
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Hydōr is one of the New Testament's great humility words. Water does not call attention to itself. It satisfies thirst, cleanses, sustains. You notice its absence, not its presence. When Jesus uses water imagery to describe what he gives, he is reaching for something everyone in his audience already knew from daily life — the absolute indispensability of water, its life-sustaining character, its capacity to refresh what is parched.
The theological claim about the Spirit and eternal life rides on the back of that shared human knowledge: what physical water is to the body, Jesus supplies to the whole person. The imagery is an act of pastoral generosity. It gives ordinary people immediate access to a profound claim. Teachers who work with hydōr texts will find in them an invitation to simplicity.
The Spirit's presence is not exotic. It is as necessary as water and as daily as drinking. The woman at the well in John 4 is not a sophisticated theologian; she is a person with real thirst, personal complexity, and social isolation. Jesus' offer of living water speaks directly to her situation without requiring her to understand the full theology first. That is the nature of Jesus' pastoral engagement with hydōr.
The offer comes first; the theology follows. Communities formed by the gospel of living water are themselves called to be springs in their neighborhoods — carrying the reality of what Jesus gives into the thirsty places around them.
John.4.14
Hydōr is one of the oldest Indo-European words in the Greek language, cognate with English 'water.' The genitive form hydatos appears frequently. The phrase hydōr zōn (living water, water that is running or spring-fed rather than standing) was a technical distinction in the ancient world — spring or running water was considered purer and more life-giving than cistern water.
Jesus uses this technical sense in John 4 to contrast himself with any static storage system for spiritual life. The word also appears in the plural (hydata) in some contexts, particularly in Revelation's imagery of many waters.
The hydōr of the New Testament is the fulfillment of the Old Testament's water-of-God imagery. Water from the rock in Exodus (which Paul reads as Christ), the promise of streams in the desert in Isaiah 35 and 44, the life-giving river from the temple in Ezekiel 47 — all of these flow into John's Gospel as the context within which Jesus' living water claims make sense.
Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7) is standing in the middle of Israel's water-celebration liturgy and announcing that he is what the ceremony pointed toward. Revelation 22's river of the water of life closes the canonical arc: from Eden's four rivers (Gen. 2. 10-14) through Ezekiel's temple river to the city where the river of life flows from the throne of God and the Lamb.
Creaturely thirst is finally, permanently, satisfied.
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