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נְבוּאָה

prophesying

H5017 Strong's Hebrew
nᵉbûwʼâh Transliteration
/neb-oo-aw/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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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.

נבואה (nᵉbûwʼâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “prophesying.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. Ezra dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. It occurs only once, in Ezra 6:14. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
prophesying
Modern gloss
prophesying
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H5017 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Ezra 6:14
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Ezra 6:14.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 1 distinct verse.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Through the prophesying 1×
  • American Standard Version: Through the prophesying 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Through the prophesying 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Prophesying of 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H5017 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Through the prophesying” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H5017 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Through the prophesying” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H5017 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Through the prophesying” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H5017 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Prophesying of” 1×

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.

  1. prophesying

Word origin

[ נְבוּאָה ] n.f. prophesying;—cstr. Ezr 6:14.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from נבואה (nᵉbûwʼâh) (H5016) — prophecy.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 2843b


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.

נְבוּאָה

  • prophecy, inspiration. Y. Hor. III, 48ᵇ bot. (ref. to Zech. III, 8) אין מופת אלא נ׳ mofeth means prophetic gift. Cant. R. to III, 4; Gen. R. s. 44, v. הַטָּפָה. Koh. R. to I, 1 נתלה נְבוּאָתָן בעצמן their prophecy went by their own names (‘the words of—’). B. Bath. 12ᵃ from the day of the destruction of the Temple ניטלה נ׳ וכ׳ prophetic inspiration was taken away from the prophets and given to &c. Y. Macc. II, 31ᵈ bot.; Yalk. Ps. 702 שאלו לנ׳ וכ׳ prophecy was asked, what is the sinner’s punishment?—Meg. 14ᵃ נתקיימה נְבוּאָתָיךְ thy prophecy has come true. Ib. היכן נבואתיך where is thy prophecy? Ib. לדעה לדעת מה יהא בסוף נְבוּאָתָהּ ‘to know’ (Ex. II, 4) to know what will be the end of her prophecy; a. v. fr.—Pl. נְבוּאוֹת. Lev. R. s. 10, beg.; Yalk. Is. 307 נ׳ פשוטות plain words of prophecy, נ׳ כפולות repeated words &c. (as naḥămu nahămu, Is. XL, e.g. Zechariah 3:8
  • 1. ; a. fr.—V. נְבִיאוּת

נְבוּאָה ²

  • Targ. O. Gen. XV, 1. Targ. Num. XI, 28. Ib. 29 (Y. נְבוּתֵיה = נבואתיה); a. fr.—B. Bath. 14ᵇ כתיב נְבוּאֲתֵיה גבי וכ׳ his (Hosea’s) prophecy is joined to Haggai &c. (belonging to the twelve Minor Prophets); a. e.—Pl. נְבוּאָן. Targ. Ez. XIII, 14, sq.

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.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

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