רְבוּ
greatness
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Particle, Definite Article 3 times (60%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (20%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7238 appears — 5 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.
Daniel 5 verses
- Daniel 4:22 וּ/רְבוּתָ֤/ךְ conj + n c fs cs + sfx pers 2ms it is you, O king, that are grown and become strong; for your greatness is grown, and reaches to the sky, and your dominion to the end of the earth.
- Daniel 4:36 וּ/רְב֥וּ conj + n c fs At the same time my understanding returned to me; and for the glory of my kingdom, my majesty and brightness returned to me; and my counselors and my lords sought to me; and I was established in my kingdom, and excellent greatness was added to me.
- Daniel 5:18 וּ/רְבוּתָ/א֙ conj + n c fs det + ptcl def.art You king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father the kingdom, and greatness, and glory, and majesty:
- Daniel 5:19 רְבוּתָ/א֙ n c fs det + ptcl def.art and because of the greatness that he gave him, all the peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him: whom he would he killed, and whom he would he kept alive; and whom he would he raised up, and whom he would he put down.
- Daniel 7:27 וּ/רְבוּתָ֗/א conj + n c fs det + ptcl def.art The kingdom and the dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole the sky, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High: his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
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.
רבו — transliterated rᵉbûw — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “greatness.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 5 verses. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Daniel. Its earliest occurrence is Daniel 4:22. It shares a root with רבה, ארבה and מרבה. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7238 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 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: Majesty 3×, Greatness 2×
- American Standard Version: Greatness 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Greatness 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Greatness 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7238 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7238 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7238 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7238 across 6 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 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.
- greatness
Word origin
Derived from רבה (râbâh) (H7235) — to multiply.
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.
רְבוּ
- , v. רְבוּתָא
רְבוּתָא
- (רְבֵי I)
- 1. greatness, dignity, office; anointment. Targ. II Esth. VI, 10. Targ. Is. IX, 6. Targ. Deut. XXXII, 3 (Y. II רַבּוּ). Targ. Zech. IX, 6 (h. text גאון). Targ. Num. XVIII, 8 (h. text מָשְׁחָה). Targ. Ps. CXLV, 3 (some ed. רַבּוּ׳). Ib. CL, 2, v. רַבָּנוּתָא; a. fr.—Targ. Esth. II, 9, v. סַמְתּוֹרָא.—Gitt. 68ᵇ מאי רְבוּתַיְיכוּ מינן wherein are you our superiors?; אחוי לך רְבוּתָאִי I shall show thee my superiority. Y. Ber. I, 2ᵈ bot. רבו היא it was an honor (to be brought into the king’s palace); a. e.
- 2. a great thing, something remarkable. Targ. Esth. II, 21.—Snh. 106ᵇ, v. בַּעְיָא. Ḥag. 24ᵃ היינו רְבוּתֵיה דנגובה (Rashi רבותא) this is the remarkable thing about ‘the dry hand’ (that is the reason for the insertion of the word נגובה, to show that even the touch of a dry hand makes unclean); מאי ר׳ דנגובה what it there remarkable in ‘the dry hand’? B. Bath. 36ᵇ; Yeb. 45ᵃ ר׳ למחשב גברי וכ׳ is it a great thing to quote authorities? (I can do the same:) here are Rab &c.; a. e.—V. רְבִיתָא II, III, a. רֵיבוּתָא.
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 5 distinct written forms H7238 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/רְב֥וּ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 4:36 | 1 |
| וּ/רְבוּתָ/א֙ | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 5:18 | 1 |
| וּ/רְבוּתָ֗/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 7:27 | 1 |
| וּ/רְבוּתָ֤/ךְ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 4:22 | 1 |
| רְבוּתָ/א֙ | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 5:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7238, 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
- ארבה ʼarbeh H697 locust
- מרבה marbeh H4766 abundance
- מרבה mirbâh H4767 much
- מרבית marbîyth H4768 multitude
- רבה rᵉbâh H7236 to grow great
- תרבות tarbûwth H8635 offspring
- תרבית tarbîyth H8636 interest
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
