תַּאֲוָה
boundary
‘boundary’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8379 appears — 1 distinct verse 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 1 verse
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.
תאוה (taʼăvâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “boundary.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. Genesis dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Its lone occurrence is Genesis 49:26. Not a single-sense word: explore its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8379 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Utmost bound 1×
- American Standard Version†: Utmost bound 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Bounties of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8379 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8379 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8379 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
תאוה I desire
- 1. desire, wish Pr 13:12, 19; 18:1; of physical appetite, longing for dainty food מַאֲכַל ת׳ Jb 33:20; distinctly good sense ψ 10:17; 38:10 Pr 11:23, 19:22 (? cf. infr.) Is 26:8 (לְשִׁמְךָ וּלְזִכְרְךָ ת׳־נָ֑פֶשׁ); bad sense, lust, appetite, covetousness ψ 10:3 (ת׳ נַפְשׁוֹ) 112:10; Pr 21:25, 26 (as acc. cogn.); particularly of longing for dainties of Egypt Nu 11:4 ψ 106:14 (both acc. cogn.) 78:30 & in n.pr. given to place where it occurred קִבְרוֹת הַתַּאֲוָה (q.v.) Nu 11:34, 35; 33:16, 17 Dt 9:22. e.g. Proverbs 13:12
- 2. thing desired, in good sense Pr 10:24 so ת׳ לִבּוֹ ψ 21:3; bad sense ψ 78:29; thing desirable (to senses) Gn 3:6 (ת׳ לְעֵינַיִם); perhaps also Pr 19:22 the ornament of a man is his kindness (Ra Ki, etc. but cf. supr.)* e.g. Proverbs 10:24
תאוה II boundary (as described by a mark?)
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
I. n.f. desire—abs. Gn 3:6 +; cstr. תַּאֲוַת ψ 10:3 + etc.;—
III. n.f. boundary (as described by a mark?);—cstr. תַּאֲוַת גִּבְעֹת עוֹלָם Gn 49:26 (this meaning AV RV Ew§ 186b [√ תָּאָה] De Gn √ אוה, תאה, תוה), but desire = desirable things, so most.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from תאה (tâʼâh) (H8376) — to mark out.
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.
תַּאֲוָה
- , v. אָוָה I) desire, appetite. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXX עושה תַאֲוַת נפשו לשעה he satisfies the lust of his soul for the moment; עושה תַאֲוָתוֹ לשעה. Erub. 54ᵃ (ref. to Ps. XXI, 3) זכה תאות לבו וכ׳ if he is worthy, thou grantest him the desire of his heart (without prayer), if he is not worthy, thou refusest him not the prayer of his lips. Sot. 47ᵃ תאותו מיהא וכ׳ his desire at least was to curse. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XXXVII לא עלתה בידו תאותו he did not succeed in doing what he had desired to do. Tosef. Ber. V, 1; Y. Pes. X, beg. 37ᵇ בת׳ with an appetite for food, v. תָּאֵב; [Bab. ib. 99ᵇ כשהוא ת׳, v. תָּאַב]; Y. Succ. II, 53ᵃ bot.; a. fr.—בשר ת׳, v. בָּשָׂר.—Esp. sexual desire. Y. Meg. IV, 75ᵃ מכניס אהבה ומוציא ת׳ it (garlic) causes love to enter, and the sexual desire to come forth. Lev. R. s. 18; Koh. R. to XII, 5 (ref. to אביונה, ib.) זו הת׳ this means the sexual desire. Gen. R. s. 85 מלאך … הת׳ the angel that is appointed over marital life. Ab. IV, 21 הקנאה והת׳ וכ׳ envy, voluptuousness, and ambition take man away from this world (accelerate his death); a. fr. e.g. Psalms 21:3
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8379, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
