נׇעֳמִי
Naomi
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Naomi’ 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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H5281 appears — 20 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Ruth 20 verses
- Ruth 1:2 נָעֳמִ֜י n Proper The name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi, and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehem Judah. They came into the country of Moab, and continued there.
- Ruth 1:3 נָעֳמִ֑י n Proper Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died; and she was left, and her two sons.
- Ruth 1:8 נָעֳמִי֙ n Proper Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, Go, return each of you to her mother's house: Yahweh deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead, and with me.
- Ruth 1:11 נָעֳמִי֙ n Proper Naomi said, Turn again, my daughters: why will you go with me? have I yet sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands?
- Ruth 1:19 נָעֳמִֽי n Proper So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. It happened, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved about them, and [the women] said, Is this Naomi?
- Ruth 1:20 נָעֳמִ֑י n Proper She said to them, "Don't call me Naomi, call me Mara; for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.
- Ruth 1:21 נָעֳמִ֔י n Proper I went out full, and Yahweh has brought me home again empty; why do you call me Naomi, seeing Yahweh has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?"
- Ruth 1:22 נָעֳמִ֗י n Proper So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, with her, who returned out of the country of Moab: and they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest.
- Ruth 2:1 וּֽ/לְ/נָעֳמִ֞י conj + prep + n Proper Naomi had a kinsman of her husband's, a mighty man of wealth, of the family of Elimelech, and his name was Boaz.
- Ruth 2:2 נָעֳמִ֗י n Proper Ruth the Moabitess said to Naomi, Let me now go to the field, and glean among the ears of grain after him in whose sight I shall find favor. She said to her, Go, my daughter.
- Ruth 2:6 נָעֳמִ֖י n Proper The servant who was set over the reapers answered, It is the Moabite lady who came back with Naomi out of the country of Moab:
- Ruth 2:20 נָעֳמִ֜י נָעֳמִ֗י n Proper n Proper Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, Blessed be he of Yahweh, who has not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead. Naomi said to her, The man is a close relative to us, one of our near kinsmen.
- Ruth 2:22 נָעֳמִ֖י n Proper Naomi said to Ruth her daughter-in-law, It is good, my daughter, that you go out with his maidens, and that they not meet you in any other field.
- Ruth 3:1 נָעֳמִ֣י n Proper Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, My daughter, shall I not seek rest for you, that it may be well with you?
- Ruth 4:3 נָעֳמִ֔י n Proper He said to the near kinsman, Naomi, who has come back out of the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land, which was our brother Elimelech's:
- Ruth 4:5 נָעֳמִ֑י n Proper Then said Boaz, What day you buy the field of the hand of Naomi, you must buy it also of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance.
- Ruth 4:9 נָעֳמִֽי n Proper Boaz said to the elders, and to all the people, You are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech's, and all that was Chilion's and Mahlon's, of the hand of Naomi.
- Ruth 4:14 נָעֳמִ֔י n Proper The women said to Naomi, Blessed be Yahweh, who has not left you this day without a near kinsman; and let his name be famous in Israel.
- Ruth 4:16 נָעֳמִ֤י n Proper Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse to it.
- Ruth 4:17 לְ/נָעֳמִ֑י prep + n Proper The women her neighbors gave it a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi; and they named him Obed: he is the father of Jesse, the father of David.
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.
At its core, נעמי (Noʻŏmîy) means “Naomi.” The word gravitates to Ruth (100%). It turns up in 20 verses across 1 book, an uncommon footprint. It first appears in Ruth 1:2. Dig into 20-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5281 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 →
- 20
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 20 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,462
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,462 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 20 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ruth 20 verses 100%
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 20 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 20 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: Naomi 18×
- American Standard Version: Naomi 18×
- Berean Standard Bible: Naomi 17×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Naomi 20×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5281 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H5281 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H5281 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H5281 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 2 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.
- Naomi = "my delight"
- wife of Elimelech, mother of Mahlon and Chilion, and mother-in-law of Ruth and Orpah
Word origin
n.pr.f. mother-in-law of Ruth, Ru 1:2, 3, 8 + 18 times Ru; 𝔊B Νωεμειν; A Νωεμμειν 1:2, Νοεμμειν v 3, usually Νοομει(ν); 𝔊L Νοομι.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נעם (nôʻam) (H5278) — pleasantness.
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.
נָעֳמִי
- (b. h.) pr. n. f. Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth. B. Bath. 91ᵃ, v. חָזָה. Snh. 19ᵇ. Ruth R. to I, 2; 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 11 distinct written forms H5281 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נָעֳמִ֑י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 1:3 | 3 |
| נָעֳמִ֔י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 1:21 | 3 |
| נָעֳמִ֗י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 1:22 | 3 |
| נָעֳמִ֖י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 2:6 | 2 |
| נָעֳמִ֜י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 1:2 | 2 |
| נָעֳמִֽי | Noun, Proper | Ruth 1:19 | 2 |
| נָעֳמִי֙ | Noun, Proper | Ruth 1:8 | 2 |
| וּֽ/לְ/נָעֳמִ֞י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 2:1 | 1 |
| לְ/נָעֳמִ֑י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 4:17 | 1 |
| נָעֳמִ֣י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 3:1 | 1 |
| נָעֳמִ֤י | Noun, Proper | Ruth 4:16 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Naomi). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
The lovable; my delight, the wife of Elimelech, and mother of Mahlon and Chilion, and mother-in-law of Ruth (1:2, 20, 21; 2:1). Elimelech and his wife left the district of Bethlehem-Judah, and found a new home in the uplands of Moab. In course of time he died, as also his two sons Mahlon and Chilion, who had married women of Moab, and three widows were left mourning the loss of their husbands. Naomi longs to return now to her own land, to Bethlehem. One of her widowed daughters-in-law, Ruth, accompanies her, and is at length married to Boaz (q.v.).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
or Nao'mi (my delight), the wife of Elimelech and mother-in-law of Ruth. (Ruth 1:2) etc.; Ruth 2:1 etc.; Ruth 3:1; 4:3 etc. (B.C. 1363.) The name is derived from a root signifying sweetness or pleasantness. Naomi left Judea with her husband and two sons, in a time of famine and went to the land of Moab. Here her husband and sons died; and on her return to Bethlehem she wished to be known as Mara, bitterness, instead of Naomi, sweetness.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
beautiful; agreeable
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 20 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 20 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.
