Greek word · G63
ἀγραυλέω
agrauleō
to live outside
To live or spend the night out in the open country (agros, field + aulē, a courtyard or lodging), camping with the animals instead of returning to the village at night.
Appears once in the Greek New Testament. ·
What it means
to dwell in the field , (New Testament) (ML)
From G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
- Range of meaning
To live or spend the night out in the open country (agros, field + aulē, a courtyard or lodging), camping with the animals instead of returning to the village at night.
- Against the English
KJV "abiding in the field", WEB "staying in the field", BSB "residing in the fields", YLT "lodging in the field". All are fair. "Field" can suggest a fenced or ploughed field to a modern reader; the Greek pictures open grazing land and men sleeping outdoors.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Found in Greek writers such as Strabo and Plutarch for living out in the open. The related adjective agraulos is a fixed epithet for shepherds as early as Homer: "shepherds who dwell in the fields" (poimenes agrauloi, Iliad 18.162). Most strikingly, in Hesiod's Theogony 22–34 the Muses appear to "shepherds dwelling in the fields" (poimenes agrauloi) and give Hesiod a divine message. This is a NT hapax: a word found only once in the New Testament.
Where it appears
Luke · 1
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Luke 2:8 ἀγραυλοῦντες lodging in the fields
And there were shepherds residing in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks by night.
Here: Built from agros (field, open country) and aulē (a courtyard or lodging), it means spending the night out in the open instead of indoors in the village. The present participle describes a way of living at the time, not one night out. The word appears only here in the New Testament.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.