אַהֲבָה
love
‘love’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H160 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Isaiah
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.
אהבה — transliterated ʼahăbâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “love.” It first appears in Deuteronomy 7:8. With 37 verses in 14 books, it is a moderately common word in the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Song of Solomon (27% of all occurrences). It is not a single-sense word — see its full sense range. See the sense tree, 37-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H160 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 →
- 37
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 37 distinct verses.
- 14 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 14 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #909
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 909 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 37 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Song of Solomon 10 verses 27%
- Proverbs 5 verses 14%
- Jeremiah 3 verses 8%
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 37 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 21 verses · 57%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 15 verses · 41%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 3%
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: Love 25×, He loved 3×, Loved 3×
- American Standard Version: Love 21×, Loved 2×, Loveth 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Love 29×, He loved 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Love 26×, Because 3×, Loves 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H160 across 40 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H160 across 41 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 16 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H160 across 38 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H160 across 43 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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 2 senses and sub-senses 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. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. human (to human obj.) abs. Ec 9:1, 6 (both ‖ שִׂנְאָה) so Pr 10:12; 15:17 cf. 27:5; v. also 17:9; of man toward man ψ 109:4, 5; love for one’s self (נַפְשׁוֹ) 1 S 20:17; between man & woman Ct 2:4, 5; 5:8; 8:6, 7(×2); Pr 5:19 cf. also 2 S 1:26 (א׳ נָשִׁים); personif. Ct 2:7; 3:5; 7:7; 8:4; cf. fig. use 3:10; of mere sexual desire 2 S 13:15; fig. of Jerusalem’s love to י׳ Je 2:2 (א׳ כַּלוּלֹתַיִךְ), & of love of adulter. Jerus. v 33. e.g. Ecclesiastes 9:1
- 2. God’s love to his people Ho 11:4 (עֲבֹתוֹת א׳) Je 31:3 Is 63:9 Zp 3:17. e.g. Hosea 11:4
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
n.f. love (= Inf. of אהב q.v.)—abs. א׳ Pr 10:12 + 18 times; cstr. אַהֲבַת Je 2:2 + 3 times; sf. אַהֲבָתִי ψ 109:4, 5; אַהֲבָֽתְךָ 2 S 1:26; אַהֲבָתוֹ Is 63:9 Zp 3:17; אַהֲבָתָהּ Pr 5:19; אַהֲבָתָם Ec 9:6—love, especially WisdLt & late.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אהב (ʼahab) (H158) — love.
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.
אַהֲבָה I
- love, friendship. א׳ שהיא תלויה בדבר love dependent on something extraneous, i.e. sensual, selfish love. Aboth V, 16.—עשה מא׳ (or עבד) to do good (serve the Lord) from pure motives of love. Sot. 31ᵃ; Snh. 61ᵇ; a. fr.—
אַהֲבָה II
- (אַחֲוָוא in Y.) pr. n. m. Ahăbah, Aḥava, son of Zera, and father of R. Adda. R. Hash. 29ᵃ. Ab. Zar. 30ᵃ; a. fr. Y. Yeb. VIII, 9ᵇᶜ
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.
Forms in the corpus
The 30 distinct written forms H160 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H160, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 37 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 37 Hebrew verses 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
- Deuteronomy 7:8
- 1 Samuel 18:3
- 2 Samuel 1:26
- 1 Kings 10:9
- 2 Chronicles 2:11
- Psalms 109:4
- Proverbs 5:19
- Ecclesiastes 9:1
- Song of Solomon 2:4
- Isaiah 63:9
- Jeremiah 2:2
- Hosea 3:1
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.
