אֶבְיוֹן
needy
also: in want, chiefly poor, needy person fuller range ↓
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H34 appears in the Book of Job — 6 distinct verses. 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.
Job
- Job 5:15 אֶבְיֽוֹן adj Adjective ms But he saves from the sword of their mouth, Even the needy from the hand of the mighty.
- Job 24:4 אֶבְיוֹנִ֣ים adj Adjective mp They turn the needy out of the way. The poor of the earth all hide themselves.
- Job 24:14 וְ/אֶבְי֑וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms The murderer rises with the light. He kills the poor and needy. In the night he is like a thief.
- Job 29:16 לָֽ/אֶבְיוֹנִ֑ים prep det + Adjective Adjective mp I was a father to the needy. The cause of him who I didn't know, I searched out.
- Job 30:25 לָ/אֶבְיֽוֹן prep det + Adjective Adjective ms Didn't I weep for him who was in trouble? Wasn't my soul grieved for the needy?
- Job 31:19 לָ/אֶבְיֽוֹן prep det + Adjective Adjective ms If I have seen any perish for want of clothing, Or that the needy had no covering;
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.
אביון — transliterated ʼebyôwn — is a Hebrew word carrying the sense “needy.” BDB distinguishes 4 senses; alongside “needy” it spans “in want”, “chiefly poor”, and “needy person”. With 58 verses in 11 books, it is a moderately common word in the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Psalms (38% of all occurrences). Debuting at Exodus 23:6, 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 H34 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 →
- 58
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 58 distinct verses.
- 11 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 11 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #629
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 629 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 58 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 22 verses 38%
- Job 6 verses 10%
- Deuteronomy 5 verses 9%
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 58 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 33 verses · 57%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 18 verses · 31%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 7 verses · 12%
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: Needy 35×, Poor 19×
- American Standard Version: Needy 39×, Poor 7×
- Berean Standard Bible: Needy 44×, Poor 11×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Needy 42×, Poor 11×, Needy one 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H34 across 61 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H34 across 57 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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 H34 across 61 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 H34 across 63 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 4 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.
- in want, needy, chiefly poor, needy person
- subject to oppression and abuse
- needing help, deliverance from trouble, especially as delivered by God
- general reference to lowest class
Word origin
adj. in want, needy, poor,—so, always abs., Dt 15:4 + 40 times; אֶבְיֹנְךָ Ex 23:6 Dt 15:11; אֶבְיוֹנִים Am 4:1 + 14 times; אֶבְיוֹנֵי (אֶבְיֹנֵי) Ex 23:11 Is 29:19; אֶבְיוֹנֶיהָ ψ 132:15—(Hex. only JED; mostly poet., 23 times ψ) needy, chiefly poor (in material things); as adj. Dt 15:7(×2), 9; 24:14 ψ 109:16 (both ‖ עָנִי); elsewhere subst.; ψ 49:3 (‖ עָשׁיר); Dt 15:4, 11; subj. to oppression & abuse Am 2:6; 5:12 (both ‖ צַדִּיק) 4:1; 8:6 (all ‖ דַּל) Is 32:7; Am 8:4 Ez 16:49; 18:12; 22:29 ψ 37:14 Jb 24:4, 14 Pr 30:14—cf. ψ 109:16 supr.—(all ‖ עָנִי) Je 5:28 (‖ יָתוֹם) 2:34; cared for by good Jb 29:16; 30:25 (‖ קְשֵׁה־יוֹם) 31:19 ψ 112:9 Est 9:22; Pr 14:31 (‖ דַּל) 31:20 Je 22:16 (‖ עָנִי); care of them enjoined, negatively Ex 23:6; = cf. Dt 24:14 supr.—positively Ex 23:11 Dt 15:11 Pr 31:9 (both ‖ עָנִי)—cf. Dt 15:7(×2), 9 supr.—ψ 82:4 (‖ דַּל); cared for by God Je 20:13 ψ 107:41; 132:15 Jb 5:15; 1 S 2:8 = ψ 113:7 Is 14:30 (all ‖ דַּל) ψ 35:10; 140:13 (both ‖ עָנִי), cf. Davidic king ψ 72:12 (‖ עָנִי) = v 4 בְּנֵי אֶבְ׳ (‖ id.), v 13(×2) (‖ דַּל); needing help, deliverance from trouble, especially as delivered by God ψ 9:19; 12:6; 40:18 = 70:6; 74:21; 86:1; 109:22 Is 29:19; 41:17 (all ‖ עָנִי) Is 25:4 (‖ דַּל) ψ 69:34; 109:31.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אבה (ʼâbâh) (H14) — to be willing.
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.
אֶבְיוֹן
- poor, distressed. Lev. R. s. 34 (etymol.) he is called ebyon, שהוא מתאב לכל (Yalk. a. l. מתאוה) because he longs for everything. Gen. R. s. 71. B. Mets. 111ᵇ
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 35 distinct written forms H34 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H34, 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 → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 49 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 58 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
- Exodus 23:6
- Deuteronomy 15:4
- 1 Samuel 2:8
- Esther 9:22
- Job 5:15
- Psalms 9:18
- Proverbs 14:31
- Isaiah 14:30
- Jeremiah 2:34
- Ezekiel 16:49
- Amos 2:6
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.
