אַוָּה
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- 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 H185 appears — 7 distinct verses across 4 books. 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.
Deuteronomy 4 verses
- Deuteronomy 12:15 אַוַּ֨ת n c fs cs Notwithstanding, you may kill and eat flesh within all your gates, after all the desire of your soul, according to the blessing of Yahweh your God which he has given you: the unclean and the clean may eat of it, as of the gazelle, and as of the hart.
- Deuteronomy 12:20 אַוַּ֥ת n c fs cs When Yahweh your God shall enlarge your border, as he has promised you, and you shall say, I will eat flesh, because your soul desires to eat flesh; you may eat flesh, after all the desire of your soul.
- Deuteronomy 12:21 אַוַּ֥ת n c fs cs If the place which Yahweh your God shall choose, to put his name there, be too far from you, then you shall kill of your herd and of your flock, which Yahweh has given you, as I have commanded you; and you may eat within your gates, after all the desire of your soul.
- Deuteronomy 18:6 אַוַּ֣ת n c fs cs If a Levite comes from any of your gates out of all Israel, where he lives as a foreigner, and comes with all the desire of his soul to the place which Yahweh shall choose;
1 Samuel 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Hosea 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.
“desire” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun אוה (ʼavvâh). It clusters heavily in Deuteronomy, which alone accounts for 57% of its uses. With 7 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at Deuteronomy 12:15, it enters the text early. It clusters with אוה, אוי and אי under a shared root. See the sense tree, 7-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H185 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 4 verses 57%
- 1 Samuel 1 verse 14%
- Jeremiah 1 verse 14%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 57%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 43%
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: Lusteth after 3×
- American Standard Version: After 3×, All the desire 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Want 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Desire of 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H185 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H185 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H185 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H185 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- desire, lust, will (not necessarily evil)
Word origin
n.f. desire—cstr. אַוַּת Dt 12:15 + 5 times; sf. אַוָּתִי Ho 10:10—desire, will, usually sq. נֶפֶשׁ; of natural human desire (morally indiff.), for meat Dt 12:15, 20, 21; of longing for sanctuary 18:6; of royal good pleasure 1 S 23:20; without נֶפֶשׁ, of wild-ass Je 2:24; of divine will Ho 10:10.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אוה (ʼâvâh) (H183) — to desire.
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.
אָוָה
- , v. אוי
אוי
- , Pi. אִיוָּה to desire, covet. Snh. 63ᵃ אִיוּוּ אלוהות וכ׳ (Ab. Zar. 53ᵇ לאלוהות, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 8) they had a desire for many deities. Denom. תַּאֲוָה. Cmp. אוּת.
- (b. h.), Nithpa. נִתְאַוֶּה (denom. of תַּאֲוָה) to desire, to be seized with a desire. Num. R. s. 10 (play on י̇ת̇א̇ד̇ם̇ Prov. XXIII, 31) the drunken man וכ׳ לד̇ם̇ יִ֗תְ֗אַ֗וֶּה will covet blood (forbidden intercourse). Gen. R. s. 51. Ex. R. s. 24, end.—Num. R. s. 2 התחילו מִתְאַוִּים וכ׳ they began to express a desire for standards (in imitation of the angelic hosts). Ib. divide them into standards כמו שנִתְאַוּוּ as they desired. e.g. Proverbs 23:31
אוי ²
- , a. Ges. H. Dict. s. v. אָוָה III) to point, mark. Denom. אוֹת II, תְּאָו, תַּאֲוָה.
- (denom. of תַּאֲוָה, תְּאָו) to mark, to mark out. Koh. R. to XII, 7 התחיל מִתְאַוֶּה תאוים he began to put up marks.
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 5 distinct written forms H185 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| אַוַּ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 12:20 | 2 |
| אַוַּ֨ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 12:15 | 2 |
| אַוַּ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 18:6 | 1 |
| בְּ/אַוַּ֤ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 2:24 | 1 |
| בְּ/אַוָּתִ֖/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Hosea 10:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H185, 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
- אוי ʼôwy H188 woe
- אי ʼîy H339 island
- הוא hâvâʼ H1933 to be
- מאוי maʼăvay H3970 desire
- תאוה taʼăvâh H8378 desire
Derived from this word
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 → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. 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 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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
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.
