יַבָּשָׁה
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 H3004 appears — 14 distinct verses across 7 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 2 verses
- Genesis 1:9 הַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֑ה ptcl def.art + n c fs God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so.
- Genesis 1:10 לַ/יַּבָּשָׁה֙ prep det + n c fs God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas. God saw that it was good.
Exodus 5 verses
- Exodus 4:9 הַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֑ה ptcl def.art + n c fs It will happen, if they will not believe even these two signs, neither listen to your voice, that you shall take of the water of the river, and pour it on the dry land. The water which you take out of the river will become blood on the dry land."
- Exodus 14:16 בַּ/יַּבָּשָֽׁה prep det + n c fs Lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go into the midst of the sea on dry ground.
- Exodus 14:22 בַּ/יַּבָּשָׁ֑ה prep det + n c fs The children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand, and on their left.
- Exodus 14:29 בַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֖ה prep det + n c fs But the children of Israel walked on dry land in the midst of the sea, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand, and on their left.
- Exodus 15:19 בַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֖ה prep det + n c fs For the horses of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and Yahweh brought back the waters of the sea on them; but the children of Israel walked on dry land in the midst of the sea.
Joshua 1 verse
Nehemiah 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Jonah 3 verses
- Jonah 1:9 הַ/יַּבָּשָֽׁה ptcl def.art + n c fs He said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I fear Yahweh, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land."
- Jonah 1:13 הַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֖ה ptcl def.art + n c fs Nevertheless the men rowed hard to get them back to the land; but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.
- Jonah 2:10 הַ/יַּבָּשָֽׁה ptcl def.art + n c fs Yahweh spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah on the dry land.
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.
יבשה — transliterated yabbâshâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “dry land.” The King James Version usually renders it “dry,” while modern versions prefer “dry ground” (Berean Standard Bible) — see the renderings breakdown. With 14 verses in 7 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Exodus (36% of all occurrences). Debuting at Genesis 1:9, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 H3004 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 →
- 14
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,910
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,910 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 14 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 14 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 7 verses · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 36%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 14%
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 9×, Dry land 2×
- American Standard Version: Dry 6×, Dry land 4×, Dry ground 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Dry ground 8×, Dry land 4×, Dry 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Dry land 7×, Dry ground 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3004 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H3004 across 14 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 H3004 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3004 across 14 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 land, dry ground (Sab. יבסם, opp. בחרם sea, DHM in MV; Palm. יבשא (dry) land Vog No. 79)—always abs. sg. יַבָּשָׁה; Ex 4:9 (J); of dry ground as path of Isr. through Red Sea Ex 14:16, 22, 29; 15:19 (all P), Ne 9:11 ψ 66:6; through Jordan Jos 4:22 (D); of dry land, opp. sea, at creation Gn 1:9, 10 (P); cf. Jon 1:9; specif. of shore of sea Jon 1:13; 2:11; fig. of needy Israel, to be refreshed by י׳’s spirit Is 44:3 (‖ צָמֵא).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יבש (yâbêsh) (H3001) — to dry up.
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.
יַבָּשָׁה
- preced. wds.) dry land, shore. Gitt. 56ᵇ עלה לַיַּ׳ he went ashore. Yeb. 121ᵃ וכשעליתי בי׳ and when I landed. Ber. 61ᵇ; a. fr.
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 10 distinct written forms H3004 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 14:29 | 2 |
| בַּ/יַּבָּשָׁ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 14:22 | 2 |
| הַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 4:9 | 2 |
| הַ/יַּבָּשָֽׁה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 1:9 | 2 |
| בַּ/יַּבָּשָֽׁה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 14:16 | 1 |
| בַּ/יַּבָּשָׁה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Joshua 4:22 | 1 |
| הַ/יַּבָּשָׁ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 1:13 | 1 |
| יַבָּשָׁ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 44:3 | 1 |
| לְֽ/יַבָּשָׁ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 66:6 | 1 |
| לַ/יַּבָּשָׁה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 1:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3004, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 13 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 14 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.
