אבה
desire
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Particle
- A short function word — article, negation, interrogative, the sign of the direct object, and the like.
Every verse where H15 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Job 1 verse
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
The Hebrew noun אבה centers on the idea of “desire.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Job (100%). A true hapax — its single appearance is Job 34:36. It clusters with אבה, אבה and אבוי under a shared root. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H15 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Job 1 verse 100%
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 100%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Desire 1×
- American Standard Version: Would 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Only 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Only 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H15 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H15 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H15 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H15 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 1 sense the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
Qal
- (c. לֹא, אַל except Is 1:19 Jb 39:9; in Hex. rare & only JED, incl. Lv 26:21); Pf. אָבָה Ex 10:27 + אָבוּ Ju 19:25 + 7 times; אָבוּא Is 28:12 (Sta§ 31 R. 2; KöI, 414); Impf. יֹאבֶה Dt 29:19 + 2 times; 2 ms. juss. תֹּבֵא Pr 1:10 (Sta§ 143 e 1 fin; KöI, 576 f) etc.; Pt. אֹבִים Ez 3:7;—be willing, sq. Inf. with ל Ex 10:27 + 29 times; without ל Dt 2:30 + 8 times; subj. י׳ Dt 10:10; 23:6; 29:19 Jos 24:10 2 K 8:19; 13:23; 24:4 2 Ch 21:7; human subj. Gn 24:5, 8 Ju 19:10 2 S 2:21; 13:25; 14:29(×2); 23:16, 17 = 1 Ch 11:18, 19 1 Ch 19:19; in bad sense Ex 10:27 Dt 2:30; 25:7 Ju. 19:25; 20:13 2 S 13:14, 16; especially of perverse Isr. Lv 26:21 Dt 1:26 1 S 15:9 Is 28:12; 30:9; 42:24 Ez 3:7(×2); 20:8; subj. animal, רֵים Jb 39:9; abs. (no Inf.) 2 S 12:17 1 K 20:8; 22:50; cf. Pr 6:35, of jealous man; bad sense Ju 11:17 Is 30:15; good sense 1 S 22:17; 26:23; 31:4 = 1 Ch 10:4 2 S 6:10 Pr 1:10; + vb. fin. Is 1:19 (אִם תֹּאבוּ וּשְׁמַעְתֶּם) consent, yield to, sq. לוֹ Dt 13:9 (good sense); sq. לִי ψ 81:12; sq. לַעֲצָתִי Pr 1:30; sq. acc. תּוֹכַחְתִּי v 25 (all in bad sense). e.g. Isaiah 1:19
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
vb. be willing, consent (cf. Assyrian abîtu, desire, DlW, Ethiopic አበየ: refuse, Arabic أَبَى, id., Nejd be willing SoDe Jes 3, p. 26; LCB 1880, 817)—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אבה (ʼâbâh) (H14) — to be willing.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
אַבָּה
- Abbah; father of Samuel; v. אַבָּא II.
אָבָה
- , v. אבי
אָבֵי
- to be willing. Targ. O. Deut. XXV, 7; a. fr.—[Targ. Prov. XXIX, 11, ed. Wil. מאבה, read מֵאֲכָהּ, v. מאך.]
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H15, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
