G5056 (end)
τέλος • telos
Semantic Field: Purpose, Eschatology & Fulfillment
Etymology & Definition
Telos (τέλος) derives from the primary verb tellō (τέλλω) — to set out toward a definite point or destination. The root sense isn't stopping. It's arriving.
That distinction was already in play long before the New Testament. Telos appears in Homer. It shows up in Aristotle as his term for final cause — the purpose or destination toward which a thing is ordered. A seed's telos is not its death in the ground. It's the tree. Every entity, in this framework, is oriented toward a completion of its nature, not merely a termination of its existence. By the time the Septuagint translators — the Jewish scholars who rendered the Hebrew scriptures into Greek beginning around the 3rd century BCE — reached for telos, they were picking up a word already loaded with three centuries of Greek philosophical freight.
That's the collision this entry is about. The LXX (Septuagint) uses telos over 130 times in the Greek Old Testament. It most frequently translates the Hebrew קֵץ (qēṣ) — "appointed end, limit, set time" — a word that dominates apocalyptic and prophetic literature. What happened when a Hebrew concept of divinely appointed limits was poured into a Greek word shaped by purposive movement toward completion? The NT writers inherited that fusion, and the sparks are everywhere.
Key Occurrences
The four most important texts span the full arc from LXX translation choices into NT theology.
Daniel 8:17 (LXX) — The angel tells Daniel, "Understand, son of man, that the vision is for the telos of the appointed time." The Hebrew underneath is קֵץ (qēṣ), meaning the set, bounded, divinely determined end-point of an era. The LXX translators rendered it telos — and in so doing, they grafted Aristotle's purposive end onto Israel's apocalyptic calendar. The end isn't just a deadline. It's a destination that history is moving toward.
Psalm 9:6 (LXX; Psalm 9:18 Hebrew) — "The telos of the enemy is desolations forever." Here telos translates a range of ideas about final outcomes and destinies. What matters is the pattern: across the Psalter, telos carries the weight of ultimate verdict — what something or someone is heading toward, not merely where they stop.
Romans 10:4 — "Christ is the telos of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." Paul was trained in the scriptures through the LXX. He's not asking whether the law ends or fulfills in the abstract — he's writing in a language where both Daniel's appointed-end and Aristotle's purposive-completion are baked into the same word. Christ is where the law was always pointed. That's not a NT innovation. It's the LXX's own interpretive logic arriving at its destination.
1 Peter 1:9 — "Receiving the telos of your faith, the salvation of your souls." Faith isn't a task you do until you can stop. It has a telos — a destination it was always moving toward, divinely appointed, purposively structured. The LXX background makes this less abstract: this is the language of prophetic fulfillment, not just personal reward.
Theological Insight
Here's the claim: the LXX translators made a theological bet, and the NT cashed it.
When Jewish scholars in Alexandria rendered the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, they consistently used telos for moments of divinely appointed culmination — not just endings, but limits set by God that history must arrive at. That was a deliberate choice. They could have used peras (boundary, spatial limit) or teleutē (personal death, biographical ending). They reached for telos because it carried the sense of purposive completion that their theology of history demanded. YHWH doesn't just stop the clock. He directs the march.
The NT writers picked up this loaded term fluently — they were LXX readers from childhood. When Paul says Christ is the telos of the law (Romans 10:4), he's not writing a systematic theology in a vacuum. He's thinking through a word that already meant, in the scriptures he memorized, the appointed moment toward which everything bends. When Jesus says in Luke 22:37 that "the things concerning me have a telos," he's invoking the same apocalyptic grammar — the prophetic script has arrived at the moment it was always aimed at.
What civilian Christianity misses is that the Bible's language of "endings" is rarely about cessation. The Greek-Hebrew fusion in telos means every time you read "the end" in your NT, the word is carrying a double freight: the appointed limit of prophetic time, and the purposive destination of created things. Eschatology and teleology aren't separate concerns. In telos, they're the same word.
REFLECTION POINT
The LXX translators had a choice when they hit the Hebrew קֵץ — the word for divinely appointed limits in Daniel and the Psalms. They picked telos, a word that in their world already meant purposive completion. They weren't softening apocalyptic urgency. They were insisting that God's appointed endings are also God's intended destinations. When you read your "end times" texts, are you reading them as a countdown to cessation, or as the arrival of something history was always marching toward?
Extended Examples
Hebrew Bible / LXX:
Ecclesiastes 3:11 (LXX) — The Greek translators use telos-family language around God making everything fitting "in its time" (en kairō autou). The Preacher's vision of bounded time is rendered into Greek with the vocabulary of purposive completion. Qohelet's resignation and Aristotle's teleology make uneasy partners, which is worth sitting with.
2 Kings 8:3 (LXX) — Telos used for the "end of seven years" in a concrete temporal sense: the Shunammite woman returning after a bounded period of famine. Thayer notes this as one of the LXX's temporal uses, where telos marks the completion of an appointed span. Even mundane calendar endings carry the word's purposive weight.
Nehemiah 13:6 (LXX) — Telos tōn hēmerōn, "end of the days" — Nehemiah marking the completion of a period of absence from Jerusalem. Here the translators use telos where we might expect a purely temporal word, reinforcing the sense that even historical periods have shape and direction.
2 Chronicles 12:12 (LXX) — Eis telos rendering the Hebrew לְכָלָה (lekhallāh, "to destruction/completeness"). Thayer flags this as Paul's source in 1 Thessalonians 2:16. The phrase carries the force of something arriving fully at its destined outcome — whether that outcome is restoration or ruin. The LXX fusion of Hebrew fate-language with Greek purpose-language is doing real theological work here.
New Testament:
Luke 22:37 — Jesus at the Last Supper: "The things concerning me have a telos." Not "my time is up." The prophetic script has arrived at what it was written for. This is LXX apocalyptic grammar in Jesus' own mouth.
Romans 6:21–22 — Paul uses telos twice in parallel: sin's telos is death; obedience's telos is eternal life. Both paths have a destination they're oriented toward. The Aristotelian flavor here is deliberate — Paul is making a teleological argument about human nature and its orientation.
1 Corinthians 10:11 — "The telē of the ages have come upon us." Paul uses the plural, drawing explicitly on LXX apocalyptic grammar. The ages had appointed ends; those ends have converged on the present moment. He's reading from Daniel's playbook.
Revelation 21:6; 22:13 — The Alpha-and-Omega declarations don't just claim God's duration. They claim God is both the origin point and the purposive destination of everything. This is the LXX translators' bet, fully paid out: YHWH who appoints the qēṣ of history is the telos toward which all things move.
Cross-References
G5055 (teleō) — the verb: to complete, accomplish, bring to fulfillment. Jesus' tetelestai from the cross ("It is finished") is this root — not "it stopped" but "it has been brought to its telos."
G5046 (teleios) — mature, complete, fully realized; the adjectival form describing what you are when you've arrived. Central to James 1 and Matthew 5:48.
H7093 (קֵץ, qēṣ) — the Hebrew word the LXX most often renders as telos: appointed end, set limit, divinely determined boundary. Dominates Daniel's visions. This is the Hebrew root that shaped how Greek-speaking Jews heard telos.
H8615 (תִּקְוָה, tiqvāh) — "hope, expectation"; sometimes rendered telos in LXX contexts because the awaited outcome of hope and the appointed end of prophetic time share conceptual territory in the Hebrew worldview.
G746 (archē) — beginning; telos' counterpart in the Alpha-Omega declarations, defining God as the frame within which all directed movement occurs.
LXX Notes
The LXX uses telos over 130 times, most heavily for קֵץ (qēṣ) in prophetic and apocalyptic contexts (Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos), but also for other Hebrew terms marking completion, outcome, and appointed limits. The key interpretive move the translators made was consistent: they did not reach for peras (spatial boundary) or teleutē (personal death/ending) when the Hebrew text was describing God's governance of historical time. They reached for telos — insisting that divine limits are also divine purposes.
This means the NT's eschatological use of telos is not Hellenizing the gospel. It's the LXX's own synthesis, native to how diaspora Jews read their scriptures in Greek, arriving at its own telos in the NT.
