Word study

Abundant

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with “abundant”. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.

At a glance

How often each original word is translated “abundant” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • רַב rabmuch, many, greattranslated this way 12 times of its 445 uses · Strong’s H7227Adjective  ·  Translated: many 171, great 65, captain 24, long 14

    Numbers 24:7 Water will flow from his buckets, and his seed will have abundant water. His king will be greater than Agag, and his kingdom will be exalted.

    Nehemiah 9:35 For even while they were in their kingdom, with the abundant goodness that You had given them, and in the spacious and fertile land that You had set before them, they would not serve You or turn from their wicked ways.

    Full study and all 426 verses →
  • רֹב rôbmultitude, abundance, greatnesstranslated this way 12 times of its 142 uses · Strong’s H7230Noun  ·  Translated: many 28, abundance 22, great 18, abundant 10

    1 Kings 10:27 The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as abundant as sycamore in the foothills.

    2 Chronicles 1:15 The king made silver and gold as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as abundant as sycamore in the foothills.

    Full study and all 138 verses →
  • שַׂגִּיא saggîlargetranslated this way 2 times of its 12 uses · Strong’s H7690Adjective  ·  Translated: great 3, many 2, abundant 2

    Daniel 4:12 Its leaves were beautiful, its fruit was abundant, and upon it was food for all. Under it the beasts of the field found shelter, in its branches the birds of the air nested, and from it every creature was fed.

    Daniel 4:21 whose foliage was beautiful and whose fruit was abundant, providing food for all, under which the beasts of the field lived, and in whose branches the birds of the air nested—

    Full study and all 12 verses →
How to study a word well
  1. Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
  2. Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
  3. Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
  4. Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
  5. See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
  6. Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
  7. Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.

Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.