רְעוּ
Reu
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Reu’ 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 H7466 appears in the Book of Genesis — 4 distinct verses. 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
- Genesis 11:18 רְעֽוּ n Proper Peleg lived thirty years, and became the father of Reu.
- Genesis 11:19 רְע֔וּ n Proper Peleg lived after he became the father of Reu two hundred nine years, and became the father of sons and daughters.
- Genesis 11:20 רְע֔וּ n Proper Reu lived thirty-two years, and became the father of Serug.
- Genesis 11:21 רְע֗וּ n Proper Reu lived after he became the father of Serug two hundred seven years, and became the father of sons and daughters.
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.
רעו (Rᵉʻûw) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Reu.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Genesis, which alone accounts for 80% of its uses. It first appears in Genesis 11:18. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7466 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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
- Genesis 4 verses 80%
- 1 Chronicles 1 verse 20%
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 80%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 20%
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: Reu 5×
- American Standard Version: Reu 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Reu 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Reu 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7466 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7466 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7466 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7466 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Reu = "friend"
- son of Peleg and an ancestor of Abraham
Word origin
n.pr.m. (proposes name of a god, Duval ZA vi. 126 MezḤarrân 23, cf. Hom A. u. A ii. 208);—son of Peleg: Gn 11:18, 19, 20, 21 (P), 1 Ch 1:25; Ραγαυ.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רעי (rᵉʻîy) (H7471) — pasture.
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.
רְעוּ
- , v. רְעוּתָא
רְעוּתָא
- = רַעֲוָא I, pleasure, will; good will; ambition. Targ. Prov. XII, 2. Targ. Y. Gen. XXIII, 8 (O. רעוא); a. fr.—Targ. Ps. CVII, 30 רְעוּתְהוֹן Ms. (ed. רַעֲיָיתְ׳, רַעֲיָתְ׳).—Constr. frequ. רַעֲוַת, רַעֲוַות. Targ. I Sam. XXIII, 20 (h. text אַוַּת). Targ. Ps. CXLV, 18 רעוות Ms. (ed. רְעוּת); a. e.—Snh. 7ᵇ ברְעוּת נפשיה of his own free will, v. צְבוּ. Lev. R. s. 3 (ref. to רעות רוח, Koh. IV, 6) רְעוּתֵיה דמתקרי וכ׳ it is his ambition to be called &c.; a. fr. e.g. Ecclesiastes 4:6
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 H7466 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| רְע֔וּ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 11:19 | 2 |
| רְעֽוּ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 11:18 | 2 |
| רְע֗וּ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 11:21 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7466, 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
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 → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Reu). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(friend), son of Peleg, in the line of Abraham's ancestors. (Genesis 11:18,19,20,21; 1 Chronicles 1:25) (B.C. about 2213.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
his friend; his shepherd
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 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.
