χώρα (chṓra) names a defined space, land, country, region, or rural area. It can identify political or geographic territory, the countryside in contrast with a city, landed ground, or fields viewed as an area.
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Full entry for χώρα (G5561) · Open the biblical lexicon
χώρα (chṓra) names a defined space, land, country, region, or rural area. It can identify political or geographic territory, the countryside in contrast with a city, landed ground, or fields viewed as an area.
The BSB source-word alignment has 28 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include region (10), country (7), land (3), fields (2), . . . (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 2:12. Its strongest book concentrations include Luke (9), Acts (8), Mark (4), John (3).
G5561 names a defined space, land, country, region, or rural area. It can identify political or geographic territory, the countryside in contrast with a city, landed ground, or fields viewed as an area. Because the noun marks where people live and act, its passages often expose relationships between place, power, mission, labor, exile, and belonging. In Acts.
13. 49, The word of the Lord spreads throughout the region after Paul and Barnabas proclaim the gospel in Pisidian Antioch amid both receptivity and opposition. In Luke. 15. 13, the younger son travels to a distant country and squanders his property, placing geographical distance within a larger story of estrangement, need, repentance, and a father’s welcome.
In Jas. 5. 4, the fields of wealthy landowners become the setting of withheld wages whose cry reaches the Lord of Hosts, making land and harvest inseparable from economic justice. G5561 opens teaching on the gospel crossing regions, distance from home, and accountability for what happens on land under one’s control. It corrects nationalist readings that treat a country as spiritually superior by vocabulary alone and corrects romantic images of rural land that ignore exploited workers.
A region is a real social space; its moral meaning comes from the people, powers, and actions described there.
G5561 appears for countries, provinces, districts, rural territory, landed property, and fields. Gospel narratives use it for travel and parable settings, Acts traces witness across regions, and James names agricultural land where injustice occurs. The noun’s breadth requires attention to political, geographic, and economic context.
And the word of the Lord spread throughout that region.
Following proclamation in Pisidian Antioch, the word of the Lord spreads throughout the surrounding region even as influential opponents stir persecution against the missionaries.
After a few days, the younger son got everything together and journeyed to a distant country, where he squandered his wealth in wild living.
The younger son gathers his property and travels to a distant country, where his wasteful life begins the parable’s movement through loss, return, welcome, and family conflict.
Look, the wages you withheld from the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.
James says the wages withheld from workers who mowed the land cry out, and the harvesters’ pleas have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.
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. country
Textus Receptus witness, full corpusGreek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 27 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
region, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
Read verseregion, land, fields
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 6 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.
χώρα 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.
G5561 gives human action a geographic setting and then asks what occurs there. In Acts, a region becomes the expanding horizon of gospel proclamation. The word spreads beyond one synagogue and city even while opposition drives Paul and Barnabas onward, showing mission as God-enabled witness rather than territorial conquest. In Jesus’ parable, the distant country heightens the younger son’s separation from his father, but the land itself is not evil; the story turns on desire, waste, famine, repentance, and the father’s compassionate reception.
James looks at agricultural territory from the workers’ side. Productive fields and accumulated wealth cannot hide stolen wages, because the Lord hears the laborers’ cries. These uses resist romantic or nationalistic accounts of land. A country can be far from home, a region can hear the gospel, and fields can contain economic injustice. God’s authority crosses each boundary, and human beings are responsible for their conduct in every place.
G5561 names the spatial sphere; the narrative or exhortation tells whether it becomes a setting of witness, estrangement, provision, exploitation, or return.
Acts.13.49
G5561 is a Greek noun for space, land, country, region, or rural territory. It may designate a political district, a broader geographic area, property, countryside in contrast with a city, or fields considered collectively.
Scripture consistently presents lands and regions under God’s sovereignty, with rulers, owners, migrants, and laborers accountable to His justice. Israel’s land story and prophetic concern for workers provide canonical background for the New Testament’s regional mission and economic warnings. This continuity does not erase distinct covenants or turn G5561 into the equivalent of every Hebrew land term.