אֲרֻחָה
meal
also: allowance, ration fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 5 times (83%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H737 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 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.
2 Kings 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 40:5 אֲרֻחָ֥ה n c fs Now while he was not yet gone back, Go back then, [said he], to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, whom the king of Babylon has made governor over the cities of Judah, and dwell with him among the people; or go wherever it seems right to you to go. So the captain of the guard gave him food and a present, and let him go.
- Jeremiah 52:34 וַ/אֲרֻחָת֗/וֹ אֲרֻחַת֩ conj + n c fs cs + sfx pers 3ms n c fs cs and for his allowance, there was a continual allowance given him by the king of Babylon, every day a portion until the day of his death, all the days of his life.
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.
ארחה — transliterated ʼăruchâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “meal.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than half of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. It first appears in 2 Kings 25:30. The lexical range runs to 3 senses — “meal” plus “allowance” and “ration”. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H737 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 75%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 25%
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: Allowance 2×, Diet 2×
- American Standard Version: Allowance 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Dish 1×, Provided 1×, Ration 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Allowance 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H737 across 6 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 H737 across 6 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H737 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H737 across 4 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.
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.
- meal, allowance, ration
- food
- diet
Word origin
n.f. meal, allowance (of food) abs. Je 40:5; cstr. אֲרֻחַת יָרָק Pr 15:17 a portion of herbs, i.e. a slender meal; elsewhere of allowance given to captive king Jehoiachin, א׳ תָּמִיד a continual allowance 2 K 25:30 = Je 52:34; אֲרֻחָתוֹ ib. = id.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ארח (ʼârach) (H732) — to journey.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H737 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַ/אֲרֻחָת֗/וֹ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Kings 25:30 | 2 |
| אֲרֻחַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 15:17 | 1 |
| אֲרֻחַ֨ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Kings 25:30 | 1 |
| אֲרֻחַת֩ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 52:34 | 1 |
| אֲרֻחָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 40:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H737, 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. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). 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 4 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.
