חָֽרָבָה
dry land
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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2724 appears — 7 distinct verses across 6 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Exodus 1 verse
Joshua 2 verses
- Joshua 3:17 בֶּ/חָֽרָבָ֛ה בֶּ/חָ֣רָבָ֔ה prep det + n c fs prep det + n c fs The priests who bore the ark of the covenant of Yahweh stood firm on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan; and all Israel passed over on dry ground, until all the nation were passed clean over the Jordan.
- Joshua 4:18 הֶ/חָרָבָ֑ה ptcl def.art + n c fs It happened, when the priests who bore the ark of the covenant of Yahweh were come up out of the midst of the Jordan, and the soles of the priests' feet were lifted up to the dry ground, that the waters of the Jordan returned to their place, and went over all its banks, as before.
2 Kings 1 verse
Ezekiel 1 verse
Haggai 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.
“dry land” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חרבה (chârâbâh). First canonically at Genesis 7:22, it enters the text early. It turns up in 7 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. It concentrates in Joshua, which alone accounts for 29% of its uses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2724 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.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 71%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 29%
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: Dry 4×, Dry ground 2×
- American Standard Version: Dry ground 4×, Dry 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Dry land 4×, Dry ground 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Dry ground 5×, Dry land 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2724 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2724 across 8 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2724 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H2724 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- dry land, dry ground
Word origin
n.f. dry ground;—abs. ח׳ Gn 7:22 + 7 times; opp. הַיָּם Ex 14:21 (J). Hg 2:6; cf. Gn 7:22 (J); opp. water of Jordan Jos 3:17(×2) (J), 4:18 (E), 2 K 2:8; of Nile-arms וְנָתַתִּ֫י יְאֹרִים ח׳ Ez 30:12.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חרב (chârêb) (H2720) — desolate.
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.
חַרְבָּה
- (v. חֶרֶב) knife. Shebi. VIII, 6 קוצץ אותם בח׳ (Ar. ed. Koh. בחורבה, R. S. בחרבא) you may cut them with a knife, opp. to מוקצה the tool especially intended for cutting figs.
חָרְבָּה
- ruin, v. חוֹרְבָּה.
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 8 distinct written forms H2724 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בֶּ/חָ֣רָבָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Joshua 3:17 | 1 |
| בֶּ/חָֽרָבָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 7:22 | 1 |
| בֶּ/חָרָבָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 2:8 | 1 |
| בֶּ/חָֽרָבָ֛ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Joshua 3:17 | 1 |
| הֶ/חָרָבָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Joshua 4:18 | 1 |
| הֶ/חָרָבָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Haggai 2:6 | 1 |
| חָֽרָבָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 30:12 | 1 |
| לֶ/חָרָבָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 14:21 | 1 |
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.
