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אֻמָּה

nation

H524 Strong's Hebrew
ʼummâh Transliteration
/oom-maw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 8 appearances

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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.

“nation” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun אמה (ʼummâh). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Daniel. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 8 verses — uncommon. First canonically at Ezra 4:10, it enters the text early. Where the King James Version says “nations,” newer translations reach for “nation” (Berean Standard Bible); the renderings breakdown has the detail. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
nation
Modern gloss
nation
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 H524 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 →

8
distinct verses
The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Ezra 4:10
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Ezra 4:10.
Daniel 7:14
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Daniel 7:14.
#2,625
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 13%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 7 · 88%

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 8 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 8 verses · 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: Nations 7×
  • American Standard Version: Nations 7×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Nation 7×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Nations 7×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H524 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Nations” 7×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H524 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Nations” 7×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H524 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Nation” 7×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H524 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Nations” 7×

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.

  1. people, tribe, nation

Word origin

n.f. tribe, people (Arabic أُمَّةٌ; Assyrian ummatu cf. JenKosmol. 336, Aramaic ܐܘܽܡܬܳܐ, אוּמָּא) only pl. אֻמּוֹת Nu 25:15; אֻמִּים ψ 117:1; sf. אֻמֹּתָם Gn 25:16;—of tribes of Ishmaelites Gn 25:16; of Midian (‖ בֵּית־אָב) Nu 25:15; ‖ גּוֹיִם ψ 117:1.

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

Derived from אמה (ʼummah) (H523) — people.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 2583


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.

אַמָּה

  • , v. אֵם)
  • 1. fore-arm, arm. Sot. 12ᵇ; Ex. R. s. 1 אמתה חד אמר ידה the word אמתה (Ex. II, 5)—one says it means אַמָּתָהּ, her arm, the other says it means אֲמָתָהּ, her maid-servant (v. אָמָה).—Lam. R. introd. (R. Josh. 2) א׳ דבצלי׳ an arm (direction-post) &c.; v. בְּצַל; Koh. R. to XII, 7 אם.—אַמַּת (בית) השחי the arm up to the axilla, arm-pit, name of an opening in a Temple door; v. however, infra. 4).—2) cubit, a measure equal to the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle-finger. Keth. 5ᵇ; Men. 11ᵃ זו א׳ this one (the middle-finger) is used for defining the cubit measure. Kel. XVII, 10 אַמַּת הבנין וכ׳ the standard cubit of the Temple proportions was six, that of the vessels five hand-breadths. Sabb. 31ᵃ א׳ הבנין the builder’s cubit (instrument).—א׳ על א׳ square-cubit. Yoma 31ᵃ; a. e.—Zeb. 62ᵇ (גרומה) א׳ גדומה; Y. Yoma IV, 41ᶜ bot. גמודה a reduced cubit; v. גָּדַם; also called א׳ בת ששה עצבות a cubit of six hand-breadths pressed together (sorrowing), opp. to א׳ (בת ששה) שוחקות a cubit of six wide-spread (laughing) hand-breadths. Erub. 3ᵇ. Y. Shek. VI, end, 50ᵇ.—Gen. R. s. 31 (א׳) תביקין Theban (Egypt.) cubit(?). B. Bath. 99ᵇ אמה בית השלחין land for digging a dyke of one cubit’s width; א׳ בית הקילון (Var. קלון, סילון) land for a creek or pond for watering cattle and washing clothes, of one cubit’s width. e.g. Exodus 2:5
  • 3. (= אצבע) membrum virile. Sabb. 108ᵇ. Nidd. 13ᵃ sq. B. Kam. 19ᵇ
  • 4. prop. river-arm, hence canal, dyke, sewer. Peah II, 2 אַמַּת המים.—Yoma V, 6 אלו ואלו מתערבין בא׳ the blood of both was mixed in the sewer; Tam. III, 6; B. Mets. 33ᵃ; Y. Hor. III, 48ᵇ top אמת (בית) השחי a sewer in the Temple called the duct of the arm-pit (from its shape; v. Grætz Monatsschr. 1880, p. 289; [emendation שית unnecessary]; v. supra.—Pl. אַמֹּות cubits. Kel. XVII, 10; a. fr.

אָמָה

  • v. אֵם; cmp. preced.) hand-maid. Sot. 12ᵇ, v. preced.; a. e.—Pl. אֲמָהוֹת. Y. Snh. II, 20ᵇ bot.; v. אֵם; a. e.

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 7 distinct written forms H524 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
אֻמַיָּ֧/א Particle, Definite Article Daniel 4:1 2
אֻמַיָּ/א֙ Particle, Definite Article Daniel 5:19 1
אֻמַיָּ֛/א Particle, Definite Article Daniel 7:14 1
אֻמַיָּ֣/א Particle, Definite Article Daniel 3:7 1
אֻמַּיָּ֖/א Particle, Definite Article Daniel 3:4 1
אֻמַּיָּ֗/א Particle, Definite Article Ezra 4:10 1
אֻמָּ֜ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Daniel 3:29 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.

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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