רַעְיוֹן
longing
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7475 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.
Ecclesiastes 3 verses
- Ecclesiastes 1:17 רַעְי֥וֹן n c ms cs I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also was a chasing after wind.
- Ecclesiastes 2:22 וּ/בְ/רַעְי֖וֹן conj + prep + n c ms cs For what has a man of all his labor, and of the striving of his heart, in which he labors under the sun?
- Ecclesiastes 4:16 וְ/רַעְי֥וֹן conj + n c ms cs There was no end of all the people, even of all them over whom he was--yet those who come after shall not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a chasing after wind.
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.
רעיון (raʻyôwn) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “longing.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. It clusters heavily in Ecclesiastes, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Ecclesiastes 1:17. It clusters with רעה, מרע and מרעה under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7475 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
- Ecclesiastes 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Vexation 2×
- American Standard Version: Striving 1×, Surely this also is vanity and a striving 1×, Was a striving 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is a pursuit 1×, Pursuit 1×, Striving 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pursuit of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7475 across 3 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7475 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7475 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7475 across 3 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.
- longing, striving
Word origin
n. [m.] id.;—cstr., רַעְיוֹן רוּחַ Ec 1:17, הֶבֶל וְר׳ רוּחַ 4:16 (cf. foreg.), בְּכָל־עֲמָלוֹ וּבְר׳ לִבּוֹ 2:22.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רעה (râʻâh) (H7462) — to shepherd.
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.
רעיון
- , Y. Keth. V, 30ᵃ top, v. דַּעֲוָון
רַעְיוֹן
- v. רְעֵי II; cmp. Hos. XII, desire, ambition, greed. Y. Sabb. XIV, 14ᶜ bot. (ref. to Deut. VII, 15) כל חלי זה ר׳ ‘every disease’, this means ambition; (B. Mets. 107ᵇ; Lev. R. s. 16 זו עין). Y. Sabb. l. c. (ref. to Deut. XXVIII, 48) ונתן … זה ר׳ ‘he will put an iron yoke on thy neck’, that is greed. e.g. Deuteronomy 7:15
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 H7475 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/רַעְי֥וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ecclesiastes 4:16 | 1 |
| וּ/בְ/רַעְי֖וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ecclesiastes 2:22 | 1 |
| רַעְי֥וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ecclesiastes 1:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7475, 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
- מרע mêrêaʻ H4828 friend
- מרעה mirʻeh H4829 pasture
- מרעית mirʻîyth H4830 pasturage
- רע rêaʻ H7453 friend
- רע rêaʻ H7454 thought
- רעה rêʻeh H7463 friend
- רעות rᵉʻûwth H7468 companion
- רעות rᵉʻûwth H7469 longing
- רעי rᵉʻîy H7471 pasture
- רעי rôʻîy H7473 shepherd
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — 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.
