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חָוָה

to declare

‘to declare’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H2331 Strong's Hebrew
châvâh Transliteration
/khaw-vah'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 6 appearances

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.

חוה — transliterated châvâh — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to declare.” Its uses cluster heavily in Job (83% of all occurrences). With 6 verses in 2 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Job 15:17. It is not a single-sense word — see its full sense range. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
show
Modern gloss
to declare
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H2331 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 →

6
distinct verses
The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Job 15:17
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Job 15:17.
Psalms 19:2
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Psalms 19:2.
#3,040
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 6 · 100%
  • 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 6 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 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: I also will shew 2×, I will shew 2×
  • American Standard Version: I will show 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Will declare 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: I will show you 2×, Will declare 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H2331 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “I also will shew” 2×
  • “I will shew” 2×

Plus 2 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 H2331 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “I will show” 2×

Plus 4 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 H2331 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Will declare” 2×

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 H2331 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “I will show you” 2×
  • “Will declare” 2×

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 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 1 sense 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.

Piel

  • Impf. 3 ms. יְחַוֶּה־ ψ 19:3; 1 s. אֲחַוֶּה Jb 32:10, 17; sf. אֲחַוְךָ Jb 15:17, אֲחַוֶּךָּ Jb 36:2; Inf. cstr. חַוֹּת;—declare, make known, c. acc. דָּ֑עַת ψ 19:3 (subj. לַיְלָה, sq. לְלַיְלָה; ‖ יַבִּיעַ אֹמֶר); c. acc. דֵּעִי Jb 32:10, 17; c. 2 acc. וָאִירָא מֵחַוֹּת דֵּעִי אֶתְכֶם 32:6, sq. sf. pers. + obj. cl., וַאֲחַוֶּ֑ךָּ כִּי־עוֹד לֶאֱלוֹהַּ מִלִּֽים׃ 36:2 and I will shew thee that (there are) yet words for God; sq. sf. pers. only Jb 15:17;—read prob. also וַאֲחַוֶּה for וַאֲקַוֶּה ψ 52:11 Hi Che al. e.g. Psalms 19:3

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

vb. only Pi. (poet. & late), tell, declare (Aramaic ܚܰܘܺܝ, חַוֵּי)—

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

Derived from חוא (chăvâʼ) (H2324) — to show.

Part of speech: Verb TWOT: 618


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.

חַוָּהּ

  • (b. h.) pr. n. f. Ḥavvah, Eve, Adam’s wife. Gen. R. s. 22 ח׳ הראשונה the original Eve. Sabb. 95ᵃ; a. fr.

חוי

  • , Pi. חִיוָּה (b. h.)
  • 1. to point. Meg. 16ᵃ היתה מְחַוָּוה וכ׳ she was pointing at Ahasver.
  • 2. to show, teach, tell. Gen. R. s. 20 (play on חַוָּה) ח׳ לה אדם וכ׳ Adam told her &c.

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 H2331 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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
אֲחַוֶּ֖ה Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular Job 32:10 2
אֲחַוְ/ךָ֥ Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular Job 15:17 1
וַ/אֲחַוֶּ֑/ךָּ Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular Job 36:2 1
יְחַוֶּה Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular Psalms 19:2 1
מֵ/חַוֺּ֖ת Verb, Piel, Infinitive Construct Job 32:6 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2331, 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

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 5 — 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 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.

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.