יָבָם
brother-in-law
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2993 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Deuteronomy 2 verses
- Deuteronomy 25:5 יְבָמָ/הּ֙ n c ms cs + sfx pers 3fs If brothers dwell together, and one of them die, and have no son, the wife of the dead shall not be married outside to a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in to her, and take her to him as wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her.
- Deuteronomy 25:7 יְבָמִ֜/י n c ms cs + sfx pers 1cs If the man doesn't want to take his brother's wife, then his brother's wife shall go up to the gate to the elders, and say, My husband's brother refuses to raise up to his brother a name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of a husband's brother to me.
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.
The Hebrew noun יבם centers on the idea of “brother-in-law.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. The word gravitates to Deuteronomy (100%). Its earliest occurrence is Deuteronomy 25:5. It clusters with יבם and יבמת under a shared root. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2993 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 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: Husband's brother 2×
- American Standard Version: Husband 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Husband’s brother 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Brother in law 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2993 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2993 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2993 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2993 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- brother-in-law, husband's brother
Word origin
[ יָבָם ] n.m. husband’s brother
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יבם (yâbam) (H2992) — to perform levirate marriage.
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.
יָבָם
- (b. h.) husband’s brother, brother-in-law who in the case of his brother dying without issue enters his estate and marries his wife (Deut. XXV, 5, sq.). Lev. R. s. 20; Zeb. 102ᵃ יְבָמָהּ מלך her brother-in-law (Moses) was a ruler.—Yeb. IV, 3, a. fr. שומרת י׳ a widow waiting for the yabam to marry or reject her. Ib. III, 9 שעליה זיקת י׳ אחד who is tied to one yabam, v. זָקַק; a. fr.—Pl. יְבָמִין. Ib. שעליה זיקת שני י׳ who is tied to two yabamim (one yabam having died after having engaged to marry her, the surviving brother combines in his person the original duty of the yabam to his first deceased brother, and the subsequent duty falling upon him on his second brother’s death). Ib. IX, 1 אסורות לִיבָמֵיהֶן are forbidden in marriage to their brothers-in-law. Ib. 52ᵃ שטר כתובת י׳ the deed of marriage for yabamim. Ib. 52ᵇ התקדשי לו במאמר י׳ be betrothed unto me by dint of the promise arranged for yabamin; v. מַאֲמַר. B. Bath. 119ᵇ פרשת י׳ the chapter relating to the duties of the yabam and y’bamah; a. fr.—Denom. e.g. Deuteronomy 25:5
יִבֵּם
- (b. h.) to marry the wife of a brother who died without issue. Yeb. II, 1 ואח"כ י׳ וכ׳ and afterwards the second brother married &c. Ib. 6 ואחד מְיַבֵּם and one of the brothers may marry her. Ib. IV, 5 או חלוץ או יַבֵּם either discharge (v. חָלַץ) or marry (her). Ib. מצוה בגדול ליַבֵּם on the eldest brother the duty devolves (in the first order) to marry the deceased’s widow. Ib. II, 7 לא יְיַבְּמוּ וכ׳ the other brothers must not both marry, but one discharges one, and the other &c.; a. fr.
- , Nithpa. נִתְיַיבְּמָה to be married by the yabam. Ib. I, 2 חולצת ולא מִתְיַבֶּמֶת she must take off the yabam’s shoe, but cannot be married to him. Ib. 4 נִתְיַיבְּמוּ if they have been married &c. Ib. 20ᵇ לא תִתְיַיבַּמְנָה ought not to be &c. Num. R. s. 21 ואם לאו תִּתְיַיבֵּם אמנו and if daughters are not considered as legal heirs, let our mother be taken in marriage by the yabam; a. fr.
יַבֵּם
- Targ. Gen. XXXVIII, 8. Targ. Deut. XXV, 7; a. e.—Yeb. 39ᵇ אי בעית יַיבֵּם if thou so desirest, marry her. Ib. אי צבית ליַבֵּם יַבֵּם if thou consentest to marry, marry. Ib. 40ᵃ יַבּוּמֵי מְיַיבְּמֵי they must marry &c.—Ib. 31ᵇ ונְיַיבֵּם לחדא וכ׳ let him marry one and &c.; a. e.
- , contr. אִיַּיבֵּם as preced. Hithpa. Ib. 30ᵇ לִיַּיבּוּמֵי (= לְאִיַּי׳) to be taken in marriage by the yabam. Ib. 32ᵃ תִּתְיַיבֵּם יַבּוּמֵי let her be taken &c.; a. e.
יָבָם ²
- ch. = h. יָבָם. Targ. Y. Num. XXVII, 4 נטרא י׳ (= h. שומרת יבם), v. יָבָם h.—Targ. Deut. XXV, 5. Y. ib. 9 (יְבִימָה) יְבִימָא; a. e.
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 2 distinct written forms H2993 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יְבָמִ֜/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 25:7 | 1 |
| יְבָמָ/הּ֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 25:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2993, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
