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עַ֫יִשׁ

Great Bear

BDB lists 3 entries for ‘Great Bear’ fuller range ↓

H5906 Strong's Hebrew
ʻAyish Transliteration
/ah'-yish/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

Compare with another word →

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 name עיש centers on the idea of “Great Bear.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. Job dominates its distribution — 2 of 2 verses. Its earliest occurrence is Job 9:9. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Arcturus
Modern gloss
Great Bear
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H5906 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Job 9:9
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Job 9:9.
Job 38:32
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Job 38:32.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

  • Job 2 verses 100%

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 2 · 100%
  • 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 2 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Arcturus 2×
  • American Standard Version: Bear 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Bear 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bear 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H5906 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Arcturus” 2×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H5906 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bear” 2×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H5906 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bear” 2×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H5906 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bear” 2×

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 3 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.

  1. a constellation
  2. Great Bear, Ursa Major
  3. (TWOT) Arcturus

Word origin

n.f. a constellation, perhaps Great Bear (cf. especially Di) (point perhaps עִיֻּשׁ (v. Bu and reff.), cf. Syriac ܥܺܝܽܘܬܳܐ PS2866, ܥܝܽܘܬܳܐ Brock., name of a star);—וְע׳ עַל־בָּנֶיהָ Jb 38:32 = עָשׁ 9:9 (both + כִּימָה, כְּסִיל etc.).

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

Derived from עוש (ʻûwsh) (H5789) — to help.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 1617


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.

עַיִשׁ

  • (= b. h.) Ursa Major (?). Targ. Job XXXVIII, 32 Ms. Var. for זַגְתָּא, q. v.

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 2 distinct written forms H5906 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
וְ֝/עַ֗יִשׁ Noun, Proper Job 38:32 1
עָ֭שׁ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Job 9:9 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5906, 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

Shares the same root

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 → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.