Bible word study

Phylake (Strong’s G5438): Meaning in the Bible

Phylake (φυλακή) is the Greek word numbered G5438 in Strong’s concordance of the Bible. Strong’s defines it as a guarding or (concretely, guard), the act, the person; figuratively, the place, the condition, or (specially), the time (as a division of day or night), literally or figuratively. In the King James Bible it is translated cage, hold, (im-)prison(-ment), ward, watch..

• Original wordφυλακή
• Transliterationphylakḗ
• Pronunciationfoo-lak-ay'
• Strong’s numberG5438
• LanguageGreek

The full Strong’s definition

Derivation. from G5442;

How the King James Bible translates it

Where Phylake appears in the Bible

In the King James Bible’s text tagged with Strong’s numbers, Phylake (G5438) stands behind 50 English renderings in 45 verses across 9 of the 66 books. It is most frequent in Acts (16), Matthew (11), Luke (11).

How the King James Bible renders Phylake, by count

• prison33 of 50 (66 percent)
• watch6 of 50 (12 percent)
• prisons2 of 50 (4 percent)
• the2 of 50 (4 percent)
• cage1 of 50 (2 percent)
• hold1 of 50 (2 percent)

Three places to read Phylake

• Matthew 5:25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.
• Luke 12:38 And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants.
• Acts 12:17 But he, beckoning unto them with the hand to hold their peace, declared unto them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he said, Go shew these things unto James, and to the brethren. And he departed, and went into another place.

Counts are made at build time from the King James text tagged with Strong’s numbers (eBible.org, public domain). Verses are read from the stored King James text, never typed.

Why the word matters

Every word the biblical writers chose carries weight. Studying Phylake in the original Greek lets you read the passages where it appears more carefully, closer to what the first hearers understood, so the meaning is drawn from the text itself rather than from the English alone.

The lexical data on this page comes from the public-domain Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890), a Hebrew and Greek dictionary keyed to the King James Bible. It is a reference tool, not a settled verdict: no single word decides a doctrine, and meaning is finally shaped by how a word is used in its sentences. Read the passages themselves, prayerfully, and in full.

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