אֵימָה
terror
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H367 appears in the Book of Genesis — 1 distinct verse. 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
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 אימה centers on the idea of “terror.” Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 15:12. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 17 verses — uncommon. Job dominates its distribution — 6 of 17 verses. Sharing its root, it stands alongside אים and אימים. 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 H367 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 →
- 17
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 17 distinct verses.
- 10 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 10 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,671
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,671 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 17 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 17 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 10 verses · 59%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 24%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 18%
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: Fear 4×, Terror 3×, Terrors 3×
- American Standard Version: Terror 4×, Me 3×, Fear 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Terror 6×, Terrors 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Terror 6×, Fear 2×, Terrors 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H367 across 17 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 H367 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 H367 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H367 across 17 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.
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.
- terror, dread
Word origin
n.f. terror, dread (Talm. id., cf. As. imtu, DlW)—א׳ Gn 15:12 +; אֵימָ֫תָה Ex 15:16 (cf. Ges§ 90, 2 R. b); cstr. אֵימַת Pr 20:2; sf. אֵימָתִי Ex 23:27; אֵמָתִי Jb 33:7, etc.; pl. אֵימִים Je 50:38; אֵמִים Jb 20:25; אֵימוֹת ψ 55:5; sf. אֵמֶיךָ ψ 88:16;—terror, dread (mostly poet.), inspired by י׳ Ex 15:16 (song in E ‖ פַּחַד) 23:27 (E) Dt 32:25 Jb 9:34; 13:21 cf. 33:7; 20:25 ψ 88:16 (‖ חֲרוֹנִים, בִּעוּתִים v 17); cf. Gn 15:12 אֵימָה חֲשֵׁכָה גְדֹלָה; occasioned by enemies Jos 2:9 Is 33:18 Ezr 3:3; by king Pr 20:2; cf. ψ 55:5 אֵימוֹת מָוֶת (‖ יִרְאָה, רַעַד, פַּלָּצוּת v 6); pred. of snorting of a war-horse Jb 39:20, of teeth of crocodile Jb 41:6; pl. fig. = idols (i.e. dreadful, shocking things) Je 50:38 (‖ פּסלים).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אים (ʼâyôm) (H366) — terrible.
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.
אִימָּה I
- mother, v. אִימָּא II.
אִימָּה II
- (אמם, √אם to gather; cmp. אוּמָּה a. עמם I in Ges. H. Dict.) distaff. Kel. XI, 6 (Ar. אימא, Var. עִימָּא).
אֵימָה
- fear, awe. Num. R. s. 9; Y. Sot. I, beg. 16ᵇ אלא מתוך דבר של אמה (read אימה) but from a solemn conversation (v., however, Maim. Sotah IV, 18 a. comment.). R. Hash. 17ᵃ; a. fr.—Pl. אֵימוֹת. Sabb. 77ᵇ חמש א׳ הן there are five sorts of fear. [Tanḥ. Tsav 2 (אימות) אימת שירוף, v. אִימּוּס.]
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 15 distinct written forms H367 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 H367, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 16 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 17 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
- Genesis 15:12
- Exodus 15:16
- Deuteronomy 32:25
- Joshua 2:9
- Ezra 3:3
- Job 9:34
- Psalms 55:4
- Proverbs 20:2
- Isaiah 33:18
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.
