רִבְקָה
Rebekah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Rebekah’ 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 H7259 appears — 29 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 29 verses
- Genesis 22:23 רִבְקָ֑ה n Proper Bethuel became the father of Rebekah. These eight Milcah bore to Nahor, Abraham's brother.
- Genesis 24:15 רִבְקָ֣ה n Proper It happened, before he had done speaking, that behold, Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel the son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother, with her pitcher on her shoulder.
- Genesis 24:29 וּ/לְ/רִבְקָ֥ה conj + prep + n Proper Rebekah had a brother, and his name was Laban. Laban ran out to the man, to the spring.
- Genesis 24:30 רִבְקָ֤ה n Proper It happened, when he saw the ring, and the bracelets on his sister's hands, and when he heard the words of Rebekah his sister, saying, "This is what the man said to me," that he came to the man. Behold, he was standing by the camels at the spring.
- Genesis 24:45 רִבְקָ֤ה n Proper Before I had done speaking in my heart, behold, Rebekah came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder. She went down to the spring, and drew. I said to her, 'Please let me drink.'
- Genesis 24:51 רִבְקָ֥ה n Proper Behold, Rebekah is before you, take her, and go, and let her be your master's son's wife, as Yahweh has spoken."
- Genesis 24:53 לְ/רִבְקָ֑ה prep + n Proper The servant brought forth jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and clothing, and gave them to Rebekah. He gave also to her brother and to her mother precious things.
- Genesis 24:58 לְ/רִבְקָה֙ prep + n Proper They called Rebekah, and said to her, "Will you go with this man?" She said, "I will go."
- Genesis 24:59 רִבְקָ֥ה n Proper They sent away Rebekah, their sister, with her nurse, Abraham's servant, and his men.
- Genesis 24:60 רִבְקָה֙ n Proper They blessed Rebekah, and said to her, "Our sister, may you be the mother of thousands of ten thousands, and let your seed possess the gate of those who hate them."
- Genesis 24:61 רִבְקָ֜ה רִבְקָ֖ה n Proper n Proper Rebekah arose with her ladies. They rode on the camels, and followed the man. The servant took Rebekah, and went his way.
- Genesis 24:64 רִבְקָה֙ n Proper Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she dismounted from the camel.
- Genesis 24:67 רִבְקָ֛ה n Proper Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife. He loved her. Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.
- Genesis 25:20 רִבְקָ֗ה n Proper Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Paddan Aram, the sister of Laban the Syrian, to be his wife.
- Genesis 25:21 רִבְקָ֥ה n Proper Isaac entreated Yahweh for his wife, because she was barren. Yahweh was entreated by him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.
- Genesis 25:28 וְ/רִבְקָ֖ה conj + n Proper Now Isaac loved Esau, because he ate his venison. Rebekah loved Jacob.
- Genesis 26:7 רִבְקָ֔ה n Proper The men of the place asked him about his wife. He said, "She is my sister," for he was afraid to say, "My wife," lest, he thought, the men of the place might kill me for Rebekah, because she was beautiful to look on.
- Genesis 26:8 רִבְקָ֥ה n Proper It happened, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was caressing Rebekah, his wife.
- Genesis 26:35 וּ/לְ/רִבְקָֽה conj + prep + n Proper They grieved Isaac and Rebekah's spirits.
- Genesis 27:5 וְ/רִבְקָ֣ה conj + n Proper Rebekah heard when Isaac spoke to Esau his son. Esau went to the field to hunt for venison, and to bring it.
- Genesis 27:6 וְ/רִבְקָה֙ conj + n Proper Rebekah spoke to Jacob her son, saying, "Behold, I heard your father speak to Esau your brother, saying,
- Genesis 27:11 רִבְקָ֖ה n Proper Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, "Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.
- Genesis 27:15 רִ֠בְקָה n Proper Rebekah took the good clothes of Esau, her elder son, which were with her in the house, and put them on Jacob, her younger son.
- Genesis 27:42 לְ/רִבְקָ֔ה prep + n Proper The words of Esau, her elder son, were told to Rebekah. She sent and called Jacob her younger son, and said to him, "Behold, your brother Esau comforts himself about you by planning to kill you.
- Genesis 27:46 רִבְקָה֙ n Proper Rebekah said to Isaac, "I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth. If Jacob takes a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these, of the daughters of the land, what good will my life do me?"
- Genesis 28:5 רִבְקָ֔ה n Proper Isaac sent Jacob away. He went to Paddan Aram to Laban, son of Bethuel the Syrian, Rebekah's brother, Jacob's and Esau's mother.
- Genesis 29:12 רִבְקָ֖ה n Proper Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's brother, and that he was Rebekah's son. She ran and told her father.
- Genesis 35:8 רִבְקָ֔ה n Proper Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried below Bethel under the oak; and the name of it was called Allon Bacuth.
- Genesis 49:31 רִבְקָ֣ה n Proper There they buried Abraham and Sarah, his wife. There they buried Isaac and Rebekah, his wife, and there I buried Leah:
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.
רבקה — transliterated Ribqâh — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Rebekah.” Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (100% of all occurrences). With 29 verses in 1 book, it is a moderately common word in the Hebrew Bible. Debuting at Genesis 22:23, it then recurs through the corpus. See 29-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7259 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 →
- 29
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 29 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,139
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,139 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 29 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 29 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 29 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 29 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: Rebekah 25×, Behold rebekah 3×
- American Standard Version: Rebekah 25×, Behold 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Rebekah 23×, Rebekah’s 3×, Now rebekah 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Rebekah 29×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7259 across 30 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H7259 across 30 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 H7259 across 30 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H7259 across 30 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.
- Rebekah = "ensnarer"
- daughter of Bethuel, sister of Laban, wife of Isaac, and mother of Esau and Jacob
Word origin
n.pr.f. Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel and wife of Isaac, Gn 22:23; 24:15 + 24 times 24, 25, 26, 27; 28:5; 29:12; 35:8; 49:31;—𝔊 Ρεβεκκα.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root probably meaning to clog by tying up the fetlock
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.
רִבְקָה I
- (רבק, Arab. rabaḳ to join, tie; cmp. רבג, רבך) team. Tosef. Par. II (I), 3 הכניסה לר׳ ודשה עם אמה if he took the young red cow into the team (that she may suck), and she did (accidentally) some threshing with her mother; B. Mets. 30ᵃ; Gitt. 53ᵃ.—Pl. רִבְקוֹת. Tosef. Erub. II (I), 2; Erub. II, 1 כמלוא שתי ר׳ וכ׳ the space required by two teams of three animals each.
רִבְקָה II
- (b. h.) pr. n. f. Rebekah, Isaac’s wife. Gen. R. s. 60 וכיון שבאת ר׳ וכ׳ and when R. came into Abraham’s house &c. Gen. R. s. 63 ראויה היתה ר׳ וכ׳ R. was destined to be the mother of the twelve tribes; a. fr.
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 19 distinct written forms H7259 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| רִבְקָ֥ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:51 | 4 |
| רִבְקָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 26:7 | 3 |
| רִבְקָ֖ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:61 | 3 |
| רִבְקָה֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:60 | 3 |
| רִבְקָ֣ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:15 | 2 |
| רִבְקָ֤ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:30 | 2 |
| וְ/רִבְקָ֖ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 25:28 | 1 |
| וְ/רִבְקָ֣ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 27:5 | 1 |
| וְ/רִבְקָה֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 27:6 | 1 |
| וּ/לְ/רִבְקָ֥ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:29 | 1 |
| וּ/לְ/רִבְקָֽה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 26:35 | 1 |
| לְ/רִבְקָ֑ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:53 | 1 |
| לְ/רִבְקָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 27:42 | 1 |
| לְ/רִבְקָה֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:58 | 1 |
| רִ֠בְקָה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 27:15 | 1 |
| רִבְקָ֑ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 22:23 | 1 |
| רִבְקָ֗ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 25:20 | 1 |
| רִבְקָ֛ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:67 | 1 |
| רִבְקָ֜ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 24:61 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7259, 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.
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Rebekah). 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
A noose, the daughter of Bethuel, and the wife of Isaac (Gen. 22:23; 24:67). The circumstances under which Abraham's "steward" found her at the "city of Nahor," in Padan-aram, are narrated in Gen. 24-27. "She can hardly be regarded as an amiable woman. When we first see her she is ready to leave her father's house for ever at an hour's notice; and her future life showed not only a full share of her brother Laban's duplicity, but the grave fault of partiality in her relations to her children, and a strong will, which soon controlled the gentler nature of her husband." The time and circumstances of her death are not recorded, but it is said that she was buried in the cave of Machpelah (Gen. 49:31).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(ensnarer), daughter of Bethuel, (Genesis 22:23) and sister of Laban, married to Isaac. She is first presented to us in (Genesis 24:1) ... where the beautiful story of her marriage is related. (B.C. 1857.) For nineteen years she was childless: then Esau and Jacob were born, the younger being the mother's companion and favorite. (Genesis 25:19-28) Rebekah suggested the deceit that was practiced by Jacob on his blind father. She directed and aided him in carrying it out, foresaw the probable consequence of Esau's anger, and prevented it by moving Isaac to send Jacob away to Padan-aram, (Genesis 27:1) ... to her own kindred. (Genesis 29:12) Rebekah's beauty became at one time a source of danger to her husband. (Genesis 26:7) It has been conjectured that she died during Jacob's sojourn in Padan-aram.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
fat; fattened; a quarrel appeased
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 29 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 29 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.
