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 in the Book of 1 Samuel — 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.
1 Samuel
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.
