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חוֹבָה

Hobah

BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Hobah’ fuller range ↓

H2327 Strong's Hebrew
chôwbâh Transliteration
/kho-baw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

Compare with another word →

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.

חובה — transliterated chôwbâh — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Hobah.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (100% of all occurrences). It occurs only once, in Genesis 14:15. See 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Hobah
Modern gloss
Hobah
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H2327 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.
Genesis 14:15
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Genesis 14:15.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 1 · 100%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Hobah 1×
  • American Standard Version: Pursued them unto hobah 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Hobah 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hobah 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H2327 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Hobah” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H2327 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Pursued them unto hobah” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H2327 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Hobah” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H2327 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Hobah” 1×

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.

  1. Hobah = "hiding place"
  2. a city north of Damascus to which Abraham pursued the kings who had pillaged Sodom

Word origin

n.pr.loc. Gn 14:15, north of Damascus; mod. Ḫoba, 20 hours N. of Dam., according to Wetzst Del Gn. ed. 4, 561 ff. so Di.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from חבה (châbâh) (H2247) — to hide.

Part of speech: Proper Name Location


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.

חוּבָּא II

  • ḥubba, name of a bird. Ḥull. 62ᵇ

חוּבָּה II

  • Ḥubbah, wife of R. Huna. B. Kam. 80ᵃ (Ms. M. חִיבָּה); Naz. 57ᵇ

חוּבָה

  • storage, v. חֵבָה.

חוֹבָה

  • (חוּב) obligation, duty; (sub. קרבן) obligatory sacrifice, opp. נְדָבָה. Naz. II, 8 הרי אני נזיר ח׳ I am a Nazir by obligation (because the condition of my vow was fulfilled), opp. נזיר נדבה a voluntary nazarite without a conditional vow. Ib. הראשון ח׳ in that case my first nazariteship was obligatory. Kinnim I, 1 הח׳ the obligatory sacrifices, opp. נדרים ונדבות. Ber. 27ᵇ תפלת … רשות או ח׳ is the evening prayer elective or obligatory? Zeb. I, 1 לא עלו … לשם ח׳ they are not accounted to those who offered them as a compliance with the obligation under which they are. Ber. 8ᵇ, a. fr. יוצא … ידי חוֹבָתוֹ has paid his obligation (of reading the Sh’ma). Ib. 20ᵇ, a. fr. אינו מוציא … ידי חוֹבָתָן cannot be the medium through which others pay their obligation (v. חוּב); a. fr. חוֹבַת הגוף, חוֹבַת גברא &c., v. גּוּף, גַּבְרָא &c.—Y. Ber. IX, 14ᵇ bot. פרוש אדע חוֹבָתִי וכ׳ a Pharisee of the class (of those who say), ‘I want to know my obligation, and I will pay it’, expl. הי דא חובתא וכ׳ what wrong have I done that I may do a good act to make up for it.—Pl. חוֹבוֹת. Succ. 56ᵃ, v. רֶגֶל; a. e.—2) condemnation, doom.—Pl. as ab. Midr. Till. to Ps IV, 8 פותחין בח׳ begin with predictions of doom, opp. נחמות. [חוֹבָה Ch., v. חוֹבָא.] e.g. Psalms 4:8

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 H2327, 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

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 6 — not the complete family. 3 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Hobah). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.

Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897

Hiding-place, a place to the north of Damascus, to which Abraham pursued Chedorlaomer and his confederates (Gen. 14:15).

Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863

(hiding-place), the place to which Abraham pursued the kings who had pillaged Sodom. (Genesis 14:15) It was situated "to the north of Damascus."

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

love; friendship; secrecy

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.