עָוַת
to be crooked
‘to be crooked’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Piel verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem. Here: ‘make crooked = falsify scales’
- Hithpael
- The reflexive or reciprocal stem (the subject acts on itself).
- Pual
- The passive counterpart of the Piel.
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 4 times (36%)
- Verb, Piel, Infinitive Construct 2 times (18%)
- Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (18%)
- Verb, Hithpael, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (9%)
- Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (9%)
- Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (9%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 11 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5791 appears — 10 distinct verses across 5 books. 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.
Job 3 verses
- Job 8:3 יְעַוֵּ֣ת יְעַוֵּֽת Piel impf 3ms Piel impf 3ms Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert righteousness?
- Job 19:6 עִוְּתָ֑/נִי Piel pf 3ms + sfx pers 1cs Know now that God has subverted me, And has surrounded me with his net.
- Job 34:12 יְעַוֵּ֥ת Piel impf 3ms Yes surely, God will not do wickedly, Neither will the Almighty pervert justice.
Psalms 2 verses
- Psalms 119:78 עִוְּת֑וּ/נִי Piel pf 3cp + sfx pers 1cs Let the proud be disappointed, for they have overthrown me wrongfully. I will meditate on your precepts.
- Psalms 146:9 יְעַוֵּֽת Piel impf 3ms Yahweh preserves the foreigners. He upholds the fatherless and widow, But the way of the wicked he turns upside down.
Ecclesiastes 3 verses
- Ecclesiastes 1:15 מְעֻוָּ֖ת Pual ptcp.pass ms That which is crooked can't be made straight; and that which is lacking can't be counted.
- Ecclesiastes 7:13 עִוְּתֽ/וֹ Piel pf 3ms + sfx pers 3ms Consider the work of God, for who can make that straight, which he has made crooked?
- Ecclesiastes 12:3 וְ/הִֽתְעַוְּת֖וּ conj + Hithpael wpf 3cp In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, And the strong men shall bow themselves, And the grinders cease because they are few, And those who look out of the windows are darkened,
Lamentations 1 verse
Amos 1 verse
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, עות (ʻâvath) means “to be crooked.” It first appears in Job 8:3. Spanning 10 verses in 5 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Job (30% of all occurrences). Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 3 stems, among them Piel and Pual. Dig into 10-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5791 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,210
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,210 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 10 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Job 3 verses 30%
- Ecclesiastes 3 verses 30%
- Psalms 2 verses 20%
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 10 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 9 verses · 90%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 10%
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: Pervert 3×
- American Standard Version: Pervert 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pervert 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pervert 4×, Does 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5791 across 11 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5791 across 11 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5791 across 11 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 H5791 across 15 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.
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses Pual (the passive of Piel) and Hithpael (reflexive or reciprocal).
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 4 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Piel
- 1.
- a. make crooked = falsify scales; pervert justice
- 2. bend, make crooked
Pual
- . what is bent
Hithpael
- . and the strong men bend themselves.
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
[ עָוַת ] vb. be bent, crooked
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
עוּת
- (v. אוֹת I), Nif. נֵעוֹת to be gratified, enjoy. Y. Ab. Zar. I, 39ᶜ top, a. e. Samuel reads יֵעוֹתוּ (with ref. to לָעוּת, Is. L, 4). e.g. Isaiah 50:4
*עוּת
- Pa. עַיֵּית (preced.) to make suitable, adjust. Lam. R. to III, 9 Ar., v. צְמַד.
עות
- , pr. n. m., v. עַזָּת
עָוַת
- v. עָוָה) to be curved, crooked.
- 1. to pervert, wrest; to corrupt. Num. R. s. 10 מתוך כך … ומְעַוְּותִין את הדין in consequence (of drinking) they cause the Law to be forgotten, and they pervert judgment. Nidd. 10ᵇ אין בודקות … מפני שמְעַוְּותוֹת אותן (not בודקין) they (the women) must not examine them (the young girls) with the fingers, because they may corrupt them (teach them unnatural gratification; Rashi: they may wound them).—Koh. R. to I, 15 (ref. to מעות ib.) אם אין אדם מְעַוֵּות עצמו מדברי תורה וכ׳ as long as a person (though doing wrong) does not pervert himself through wilful misinterpretation of the Law, there is a remedy for him; משאדם מעוות וכ׳ but as soon as a person perverts himself &c.; a. fr.—Nidd. 12ᵇ (adapting Koh. l. c.) הן עִוְּתוּהָ הן תקנוה they make her crooked (the evidence on the cloths will make her unfit for marital intercourse), and they make her straight (if the evidence is favorable).
- 2. to offend, excite displeasure; wound the feelings of. Snh. 97ᵃ יְעַיֵּת; Der. Er. Zut. ch. X יְעַוֵּות shall be offensive, v. אָמַר II. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXIX, 78 אע"פ … מְעַוְּתִים אותי וכ׳ although the wicked insult me, I do not abandon the Law.
- 3. to render offensive, loathsome. Sifré Deut. 1; Yalk. ib. 792 למה אתה מְעַוֵּות עלינו וכ׳ why dost thou make the Scriptures loathsome to us (by absurd interpretations)?—Part. pass. מְעֻוָּת, מְעוּוָּת; f. מְעוֶּוּתֶת; pl. מְעוּוָּתִים, מְעוּוָּתִין; מְעִוּוָּתוֹת, מְעֻוָּ׳ crooked, perverted, perverse. Koh. R. l. c. בעולם הזה מי שהוא מע׳ וכ׳ in this world, he who is crooked may be straightened again (a sinner may amend his ways) &c. Ex. R. s. 2, beg. (ref. to עלילות, Ps. CIII, 7, in contrast to Deut. XXII, 14) [read:] בשר ודם עלילותיו מע׳ וכ׳ the ʿăliloth (machinations) of man are perverse …, but the ʿăliloth (dispositions) of the Lord are merciful; a. e. e.g. Psalms 103:7
- to be curved, wrested; to be perverted; to deteriorate. Koh. R. l. c. אין קורין מעוות … ונ׳ we do not call a thing perverted, unless it was at a time straight (right), and it became curved. Ib. משנִתְעַיְּותוּ המים וכ׳ when the waters dating from creation became deteriorated. Sot. 41ᵇ נִתְעַוְּותוּ הדינין (or הדַּיָּנִין, v. Rashi a. l.) the courts became depraved. Ib. 47ᵇ נתעוותו הדינין justice became corrupt; (Tosef. ib. XIV, 3 נתקלקל הדין).
עֲלִילָה
- preced.)
- 1. [bringing about, causation,] dealing, government, disposition.—Pl. עֲלִילוֹת. Ex. R. s. 2, v. עָוַת.
- 2. (v. עִילָה) [round about way,] circumvention, perverseness, insidiousness; pretext, false charge. Snh. 101ᵇ שלשה באו בע׳ three men (Biblical personages) came with indirectness (instead of praying in a straightforward manner). Gen. R. s. 93 מתחלה באת עלינו בע׳ from the start thou camest against us with insidiousness (trying to find charges against us); Tanḥ. Vayigg. 5; Yalk. Gen. 151. Esth. R. to III, 9 המן … בע׳ גדולה וכ׳ Haman, the wicked, came with great trickery against Israel (tempting them to sin). Ib. באו בע׳ וכ׳ they (the Israelites) came with a pretext, saying, let us go to sacrifice (Ex. V, 3). Pesik. R. s. 26 ראה היאך תמצא לו ע׳ וכ׳ see how thou canst find a charge against Jeremiah and be revenged on him; a. fr.—Pl. as ab. Ex. R. l. c., v. עָוַת. Num. R. s. 20 שלא ליתן לו ע׳ (not יתן) so as not to allow him any excuses. e.g. Exodus 5:3
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 10 distinct written forms H5791 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יְעַוֵּֽת | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 8:3 | 2 |
| וְ/הִֽתְעַוְּת֖וּ | Verb, Hithpael, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Ecclesiastes 12:3 | 1 |
| וּ/לְ/עַוֵּ֖ת | Verb, Piel, Infinitive Construct | Amos 8:5 | 1 |
| יְעַוֵּ֣ת | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 8:3 | 1 |
| יְעַוֵּ֥ת | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 34:12 | 1 |
| לְ/עַוֵּ֤ת | Verb, Piel, Infinitive Construct | Lamentations 3:36 | 1 |
| מְעֻוָּ֖ת | Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 1:15 | 1 |
| עִוְּת֑וּ/נִי | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Psalms 119:78 | 1 |
| עִוְּתָ֑/נִי | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 19:6 | 1 |
| עִוְּתֽ/וֹ | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Ecclesiastes 7:13 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5791, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 10 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.
