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
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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).
21 verses where H34 appears in the Absolute state in the Book of Psalms. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Psalms
- Psalms 9:18 אֶבְי֑וֹן adj Adjective ms For the needy shall not always be forgotten, Nor the hope of the poor perish forever.
- Psalms 12:5 אֶבְי֫וֹנִ֥ים adj Adjective mp "Because of the oppression of the weak and because of the groaning of the needy, I will now arise," says Yahweh; "I will set him in safety from those who malign him."
- Psalms 35:10 וְ֝/אֶבְי֗וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms All my bones shall say, "Yahweh, who is like you, Who delivers the poor from him who is too strong for him, Yes, the poor and the needy from him who robs him?"
- Psalms 37:14 וְ/אֶבְי֑וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, To cast down the poor and needy, To kill those who are upright in the way.
- Psalms 40:17 וְ/אֶבְיוֹן֮ conj + Adjective Adjective ms But I am poor and needy; May the Lord think about me. You are my help and my deliverer. Don't delay, my God.
- Psalms 49:2 וְ/אֶבְיֽוֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms Both low and high, Rich and poor together.
- Psalms 69:33 אֶבְיוֹנִ֣ים adj Adjective mp For Yahweh hears the needy, And doesn't despise his captive people.
- Psalms 70:5 וְ/אֶבְיוֹן֮ conj + Adjective Adjective ms But I am poor and needy. Come to me quickly, God. You are my help and my deliverer. Yahweh, don't delay.
- Psalms 72:4 אֶבְי֑וֹן adj Adjective ms He will judge the poor of the people. He will save the children of the needy, And will break the oppressor in pieces.
- Psalms 72:12 אֶבְי֣וֹן adj Adjective ms For he will deliver the needy when he cries; The poor, who has no helper.
- Psalms 72:13 וְ/אֶבְי֑וֹן אֶבְיוֹנִ֣ים conj + Adjective Adjective ms adj Adjective mp He will have pity on the poor and needy. He will save the souls of the needy.
- Psalms 74:21 וְ֝/אֶבְי֗וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms Don't let the oppressed return ashamed. Let the poor and needy praise your name.
- Psalms 82:4 וְ/אֶבְי֑וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked."
- Psalms 86:1 וְ/אֶבְי֣וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms Hear, Yahweh, and answer me, For I am poor and needy.
- Psalms 107:41 אֶבְי֣וֹן adj Adjective ms Yet he lifts the needy out of their affliction, And increases their families like a flock.
- Psalms 109:16 וְ֭/אֶבְיוֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms Because he didn't remember to show kindness, But persecuted the poor and needy man, The broken in heart, to kill them.
- Psalms 109:22 וְ/אֶבְי֣וֹן conj + Adjective Adjective ms For I am poor and needy. My heart is wounded within me.
- Psalms 109:31 אֶבְי֑וֹן adj Adjective ms For he will stand at the right hand of the needy, To save him from those who judge his soul.
- Psalms 112:9 לָ/אֶבְיוֹנִ֗ים prep det + Adjective Adjective mp He has dispersed, he has given to the poor. His righteousness endures forever. His horn will be exalted with honor.
- Psalms 113:7 אֶבְיֽוֹן adj Adjective ms He raises up the poor out of the dust. Lifts up the needy from the ash heap;
- Psalms 140:12 אֶבְיֹנִֽים adj Adjective mp I know that Yahweh will maintain the cause of the afflicted, And justice for the needy.
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.
