אֱוִי
Evi
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Evi’ 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.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H189 appears in the Book of Joshua — 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.
Joshua
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.
At its core, אוי (ʼĔvîy) means “Evi.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. Its uses cluster heavily in Numbers (50% of all occurrences). It first appears in Numbers 31:8. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H189 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
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: Evi 1×, Namely evi 1×
- American Standard Version: Evi 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Evi 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Evi 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H189 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H189 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H189 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H189 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- Evi = "my desire"
- one of five chiefs of Midian
Word origin
n.pr.m. (desire?) one of five chiefs of Midian Nu 31:8; Jos 13:21.
— 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.
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.
אוֹי
- (v. אוי I) [pressure] woe, sorrow. Gen. R. s. 46 בי לא אוי there is no (cause for) woe with me. Num. R. s. 10 (play on ăboy, Prov. XXIII, 29) אַב אוי father of woe.—2) interj. woe! alas! Kel. XVII, 16; a. v. fr. e.g. Proverbs 23:29
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 H189, 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
- אוה ʼavvâh H185 desire
- אוי ʼôwy H188 woe
- אי ʼîy H339 island
- הוא hâvâʼ H1933 to be
- מאוי maʼăvay H3970 desire
- תאוה taʼăvâh H8378 desire
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Evi). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(desire), one of the five kings or princes of Midian slain by the Israelites. (Numbers 31:8; Joshua 13:21)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
unjust
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
