עֵרָבוֹן
security
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
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6162 appears — 3 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.
Genesis 3 verses
- Genesis 38:17 עֵרָב֖וֹן n c ms He said, "I will send you a kid of the goats from the flock." She said, "Will you give me a pledge, until you send it?"
- Genesis 38:18 הָֽ/עֵרָבוֹן֮ ptcl def.art + n c ms He said, "What pledge will I give you?" She said, "Your signet and your cord, and your staff that is in your hand." He gave them to her, and came in to her, and she conceived by him.
- Genesis 38:20 הָ/עֵרָב֖וֹן ptcl def.art + n c ms Judah sent the kid of the goats by the hand of his friend, the Adullamite, to receive the pledge from the woman's hand, but he didn't find her.
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, ערבון (ʻărâbôwn) means “security.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (100% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Genesis 38:17. Sharing its root, it stands alongside ערב, מערב and ערב. Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6162 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 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: Pledge 3×
- American Standard Version: Pledge 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Items he had left with 1×, Pledge 1×, Something as a pledge 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pledge 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6162 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6162 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6162 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6162 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- pledge, security
Word origin
n.[m.] pledge;—נָתַן ע׳ give a pledge Gn 38:17, 18, לָקַח ע׳ v 20 (all J), receive (back) a pledge (when condition is fulfilled).—Jb 17:3 read perhaps עֶרְבֹנִי (for MT עָרְבֵנִי), as obj. of שִׂימָה set my pledge (a surety for me), so Beer Bu al.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ערב (ʻârab) (H6148) — to pledge.
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.
עֵרָבוֹן
- (עָרַב I) mingling, suit of followers. Ab. Zar. 39ᵃ מפני שעֵרְבוֹנָהּ עולה עמה (Rashi to 35ᵇ a. v. והחילק: שעירבונה) because its following goes with it (borrowed fr. Ex. XII, 38), i.e. because all the small fish resembling the ḥilleḳ are packed with it when offered for sale. e.g. Exodus 12:38
עֵרָבוֹן ²
- 1. pledge, earnest-money. B. Mets. 48ᵇ הנותן ע׳ … עֵרְבוֹנִי מחול לך והלה … אכפול לך עֵרְבוֹנְךָ if a man gives an earnest to his neighbor and says, if I retract, my earnest shall be forfeit to thee; and the neighbor says, if I retract, I shall double thy earnest to thee; Tosef. ib. I, 17, sq. Esth. R. to III, 10 מנהגו של עולם דרכו של לוקח ליתן ע׳ וכ׳ ordinarily it is the purchaser that gives an earnest to the seller, but here the seller (Ahasuerus) gives a pledge (his ring); Ruth R. to IV, 8. Pes. 118ᵇ (ref. to Jud. V, 21) אמר הקב"ה … צא והשלם ערבונך the Lord said to the brook Kishon, go and surrender thy pledge (Sisera’s men bathing in the brook). Ab. III, 16 הכל נתון בע׳ every thing is given against a pledge, i.e. life and possession are a loan for which you are pledged to the Lord; a. fr. e.g. Judges 5:21
- 2. going security.—Pl. עֵרְבוֹנוֹת. Yeb. 109ᵃ ויתרחק … ומן הע׳ (Rashi ערבון) and should keep aloof from cases of protest (v. מִיאוּן), from trusts, and from going security (Gen. R. s. 93, beg. מלעשות ערבות וכ׳).
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 3 distinct written forms H6162 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הָ/עֵרָב֖וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 38:20 | 1 |
| הָֽ/עֵרָבוֹן֮ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 38:18 | 1 |
| עֵרָב֖וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 38:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6162, 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
- מערב maʻărâb H4627 merchandise
- ערב ʻârab H6150 to become evening
- ערב ʻărab H6151 to mix
- ערב ʻêreb H6154 mixture
- ערב ʻârâb H6155 poplar
- ערב ʻârôb H6157 swarm
- תערבה taʻărubâh H8594 pledge
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 10 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
