תְּשׁוּבָה
answer
also: a recurrence, return 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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 6 times (75%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 1 time (13%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8666 appears — 8 distinct verses across 6 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.
1 Samuel 1 verse
2 Samuel 1 verse
1 Kings 2 verses
- 1 Kings 20:22 לִ/תְשׁוּבַ֣ת prep + n c fs cs The prophet came near to the king of Israel, and said to him, Go, strengthen yourself, and mark, and see what you do; for at the return of the year the king of Syria will come up against you.
- 1 Kings 20:26 לִ/תְשׁוּבַ֣ת prep + n c fs cs It happened at the return of the year, that Ben Hadad mustered the Syrians, and went up to Aphek, to fight against Israel.
1 Chronicles 1 verse
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Job 2 verses
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.
At its core, תשובה (tᵉshûwbâh) means “answer.” Not a single-sense word, it carries 4 senses, among them “a recurrence” and “return”. Spanning 8 verses in 6 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in 1 Kings (25% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in 1 Samuel 7:17. 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 H8666 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 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 8 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 50%
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: Was expired 3×, Return 2×
- American Standard Version: Return 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Spring 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Return of 5×, Answers 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8666 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8666 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H8666 across 8 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8666 across 8 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 4 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.
- a recurrence, an answer, return
- return
- at the return (construct)
- answer, reply
Word origin
[ תְּשׁוּבָה ] n.f. return, answer
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שוב (shûwb) (H7725) — to return.
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.
תְּשׁוּבָה
- 1. return to God, repentance. Ab. IV, 11, v. תָּרִיס. Pes. 54ᵃ שבעה … תורה ת׳ וכ׳ seven things were created before the world was made, they are: the Law, repentance &c. Ib. 119ᵃ (ref. to Ez. I, 8) זה ידו … כדי לקבל בעלי ת׳ that is the hand of the Lord which is spread under the wings of the Ḥayoth (v. חַיָּה I) to receive the repentant sinners. Ber. 34ᵇ מקום שבעלי ת׳ עומדין וכ׳ where the repentant sinners stand, the perfectly righteous are not permitted to stand, for it is said (Is. LVII, 19) &c. Yeb. 21ᵃ (in Chald. dict.) הני אפשר בת׳ הני לא אפשר בת׳ these sins (of incest) may be remedied by repentance, but those (of giving false measures) cannot be remedied by repentance (because you can make no restoration). Pesik. R. s. 28 (ref. to Ps. CXXXVII, 2) בא וראה עפרה … לת׳ וכ׳ come and see (the power of the love of) the dust of the land of Israel for repentance: as long as they were in the land of Israel, Jeremiah said to them, do penance, &c.; a. fr.— reply, answer. Sabb. 88ᵇ החזיר להן ת׳ give them an answer (refute their argument). Pes. 94ᵃ מה ת׳ השיבתו בת קול וכ׳ what was the reply the divine voice gave to that wicked man (Nebuchadnezzar), when he said (Is. XIV, 13), I will rise &c.?; Ḥag. 13ᵃ. Snh. 91ᵃ החזירו לו ת׳ make your argument against him; לא מצאו ת׳ they could find nothing to reply. Ib. 105ᵃ, v. נִצֵּחַ. Ab. Zar. 44ᵇ ת׳ גנובה, v. גָּנַב; a. fr.—Pl. תְּשׁוּבוֹת. Yoma 12ᵇ שתי ת׳ בדבר חדא וכ׳ there are two arguments against it, first that &c.; Keth. 87ᵇ; a. fr.—Gen. R. s. 20 בעל ת׳, v. בַּעַל. e.g. Ezekiel 1:8
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 7 distinct written forms H8666 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לִ/תְשׁוּבַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Kings 20:22 | 2 |
| וְ/לִ/תְשׁוּבַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Chronicles 36:10 | 1 |
| וּ/תְשֻׁבָת֤/וֹ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Samuel 7:17 | 1 |
| וּ֝/תְשֽׁוּבֹתֵי/כֶ֗ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Job 21:34 | 1 |
| לִ/תְשׁוּבַ֨ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 11:1 | 1 |
| תְּ֝שֻׁבֹ֗ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Job 34:36 | 1 |
| תְּשׁוּבַ֨ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Chronicles 20:1 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8666, 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
- משובה mᵉshûwbâh H4878 apostasy
- שובב shôwbâb H7726 backsliding
- שובב shôwbêb H7728 backsliding
- שובה shûwbâh H7729 withdrawal
- שיבה shîybâh H7870 restoration
- תוב tûwb H8421 to return
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- יושב חסד Yûwshab Cheçed H3142 Jushab-hesed
- ישבי לחם Yâshubîy Lechem H3433 Jashubi-lehem
- ישבעם Yâshobʻâm H3434 Jashobeam
- ישוב Yâshûwb H3437 Jashub
- משובב Mᵉshôwbâb H4877 Meshobab
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. 5 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
