Lexicon

H0113 - adon

Strong's: H113 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: aw-dohn' Part of speech: masculine noun Frequency: ~335 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible (combined forms; the suffixed and pluralized forms account for the bulk) LXX equivalent: κύριος (G2962 - kyrios, "lord / master")

Semantic range (Brown-Driver-Briggs)

Lord, master, of any superior in a relation of authority: a slave-owner over slaves, a husband over a household, a ruler over subjects, a king over a kingdom. This is the foundational social sense, adon names someone whose authority creates an asymmetric relation requiring deference, obedience, or service.
Master, owner, proprietary sense: the one to whom the slave / land / household belongs (Genesis 24:9-10; Exodus 21:4-8).
Lord, divine title, when applied to God, names YHWH as the sovereign master of Israel and of the cosmos. The intensive plural adonai (אֲדֹנָי, H0136 - adonai) is the dedicated divine form, used as a vocal substitute for the Tetragrammaton.

Theological force, the Lord-vs-Lord predication

Adon matters christologically because of one verse: Psalms 110.1, nəʾum YHWH la-ʾdoni, "The LORD says to my Lord, 'Sit at My right hand.'" The two distinct words for "Lord" in a single sentence create the apologetic and theological lever:

YHWH (the Tetragrammaton), the LORD who speaks
adoni (אֲדֹנִי, adon + 1cs suffix), my Lord, addressed by David, who is the speaker of the Psalm

David, the king of Israel, calls someone else "my Lord", and that someone is being told by YHWH to sit at YHWH's right hand. No mere human messianic king is David's lord (David is the king); only a figure greater than David fits the syntax. Jesus (Matthew 22:41-46; Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:41-44) makes this the climactic question of His public ministry: "If David then calls Him 'Lord,' how is He his son?" The Pharisees cannot answer; the question is the wedge for high christology.

Peter's Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:34-36) closes the loop: God has made Jesus both Lord and Christ, and the proof is that Psalm 110:1's "my Lord" is the risen Jesus seated at the Father's right hand. Hebrews 1:13 makes the same move ("To which of the angels has He ever said, 'Sit at My right hand'?"). Romans 10:9's confession Kyrios Iēsous ("Jesus is Lord") is the LXX-form of the adoni predication.

The lever is the unique applicability of adon / kyrios to Jesus by David's mouth in YHWH's prophecy. This is why Psalm 110:1 is the most-quoted OT verse in the NT.

Notable verses

The christological locus classicus

Psalms 110.1, YHWH speaks to adoni, the two-Lord predication
Matthew 22:41-46, Jesus's "Whose son is the Christ?" question turning on adoni
Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:41-44, synoptic parallels
Acts 2:34-36, Peter's Pentecost identification of adoni as the risen Jesus
Hebrews 1:13; Hebrews 5:6; 7:17, 21; 10:12-13, Hebrews' sustained use of Ps 110

Other christologically loaded adon texts

Malachi 3.1, "the adon (הָאָדוֹן, with the article, the Lord) whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple", the awaited divine arrival; the article makes this not just a lord but the Lord, a title applied here to YHWH-coming-in-person, fulfilled in Jesus's temple-cleansing (Mark 11:15-17 par.)
Isaiah 6:1, Isaiah sees adonai (אֲדֹנָי, the divine plural) seated on the throne; John 12:41 says Isaiah "saw His [Christ's] glory and spoke of Him"
Daniel 9:17, 19; Nehemiah 1:11, adonai in covenant prayer

Social / household adon

Genesis 18:12, Sarah calls Abraham adoni, wifely-deferential use (cited in 1 Peter 3:6 for Sarah's faith-pattern)
Genesis 24:9-10, 12, 14, 27, 35-36, 42, the servant of Abraham repeatedly says adoni Abraham, patriarchal-household sense
Exodus 21:4-8, slave-master relation in the case-law; adon names the proprietor
Judges 19:11-12, host-guest deferential address
1 Samuel 25:24-31, Abigail's twelvefold adoni to David, graceful deference
2 Samuel 19:19, 26-28, Mephibosheth and Shimei use adoni-ha-melekh ("my lord the king"), royal-court deference

Cosmic adon

Joshua 3:11, 13, "the ark of the Adon of all the earth", YHWH titled as universal sovereign
Psalm 8:1, 9, YHWH adoneinu, "O LORD, our Lord", the bracketing doxology of Psalm 8
Zechariah 6:5, "the Adon of the whole earth"

Adon and Adonai, the relationship

H0136 - adonai (אֲדֹנָי) is grammatically an intensive plural of adon with a 1cs suffix ("my Lords"), but functions as a frozen divine title, used as the audible substitute for YHWH when the Tetragrammaton is read aloud (the qere perpetuum tradition: in the Masoretic text the consonants of YHWH carry the vowels of adonai as a reading-cue). This is why every English translation that prints "LORD" (small caps) for YHWH and "Lord" for adonai is preserving an originally vocal distinction between the proper name and its substituted reading.

The LXX collapses the distinction by rendering both as κύριος. This collapse is christologically momentous: when the NT writers apply κύριος to Jesus, they are using the same lexeme the LXX uses to render both the Tetragrammaton and the divine title, and the choice to apply it to the resurrected Jesus is therefore a maximally weighted predication. Romans 10:9 ("Jesus is Kyrios"), Philippians 2:11 ("every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Kyrios"), and 1 Corinthians 12:3 ("no one can say 'Jesus is Kyrios' except by the Holy Spirit") all weaponize this LXX-equivalence.

Patristic / scholarly note

The early church's confession Kyrios Iēsous (Romans 10:9) is the earliest Christian creed (Hengel, The Son of God, 1976; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 2008). Its provocative force is precisely the LXX-reading of adon / adonai / YHWH under one Greek lexeme: confessing Jesus as Kyrios is confessing Him as the bearer of the divine name, what Larry Hurtado calls the "binitarian devotion pattern" of earliest Christianity. The Roman political pressure (Pliny to Trajan, ca. AD 112; the Kyrios Kaisar loyalty oath) sharpened the confession: the early Christians refused to call the emperor Kyrios because the title was reserved for Jesus, a refusal that explicitly traces to the OT's exclusive adon-adonai-YHWH lordship of the covenant God.

The Targums and Rabbinic literature treat Psalm 110:1 with unease, by the time of the Tannaim, the predominant rabbinic reading deflects the adoni away from a divine messianic referent (assigning it to Abraham, then to David himself). Daniel Boyarin (The Jewish Gospels, 2012) and Michael Heiser (The Unseen Realm, 2015) argue the deflection is secondary, that pre-Christian Jewish exegesis (4Q174; 11QMelchizedek; Daniel 7's Son of Man; the Two Powers in Heaven tradition cataloged by Alan Segal) was open to a divine-messianic reading of adoni in Ps 110:1, and that the rabbis closed it down precisely because Christians had cemented the christological reading.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. Top-cited references using adon / adonai: Psalms 110.1, Malachi 3.1, Acts 2:34-36 (NT citation).